THE  LIBRARY 

OF 
THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 
LOS  ANGELES 


HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 
NINETEENTH  CENTURY 


A  HISTORY 

OF 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

In  Four  Volumes.      Crown  &vo. 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE  FROM  THE  BEGIN- 
NING TO  THE  NORMAN  CONQUEST.  By 
Rev.  STOPFORD  A.  BROOKE,  M.A.  Crown  8vo. 
7s.  6d. 

ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE  (1560-1665).  By 
Prof.  GEORGE  SAINTSBURY.  75.  6d. 

EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE  (1660- 
1780).  By  EDMUND  GOSSE.  M.A.  75.  6d. 

NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE  (1780- 
1900;.  By  Prof.  G.  SAINTSBURY.  73.  6d. 

MACMILLAN  AND  CO.,   LTD.,   LONDON. 


A   HISTORY 


OF 


NINETEENTH     CENTURY 

LITERATURE 

(1780-1900) 


BY 

GEORGE    SAINTSBURY 

PROFESSOR   OF   RHETORIC    AND   ENGLISH    LITERATURE    IN   THE    UNIVERSITY   OF   EDINBURGH 


ilontion 

MACMILLAN    AND    CO.,   LIMITED 

NEW  YORK:   THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 


First  Edition  February  1896 

Reprinted  December  1896 

1901,  1903 


Library 


PREFACE 

IN  the  execution  of  the  present  task  (which  I  took  over  about 
two  years  ago  from  hands  worthier  than  mine,  but  then  more 
occupied)  some  difficulties  of  necessity  occurred  which  did  not 
present  themselves  to  myself  when  I  undertook  the  volume  of 
Elizabethan  Literature,  or  to  my  immediate  predecessor  in 
grappling  with  the  period  between  1660  and  1780. 

The  most  obvious  and  serious  of  these  was  the  question, 
"What  should  be  done  with  living  authors?"  Independently  of 
certain  perils  of  selection  and  exclusion,  of  proportion  and  of 
freedom  of  speech,  I  believe  it  will  be  recognised  by  every  one 
who  has  ever  attempted  it,  that  to  mix  estimates  of  work  which  is 
done  and  of  work  which  is  unfinished  is  to  the  last  degree  un- 
satisfactory. I  therefore  resolved  to  include  no  living  writer, 
except  Mr.  Ruskin,  in  this  volume  for  the  purpose  of  detailed 
criticism,  though  some  may  be  now  and  then  mentioned  in 
passing. 

Even  with  this  limitation  the  task  remained  a  rather  for- 
midable one.  Those  who  are  least  disposed  to  overvalue 
literary  work  in  proportion  as  it  approaches  their  own  time  will 
still  acknowledge  that  the  last  hundred  and  fifteen  years  are  fuller 
furnished  than  either  of  the  periods  of  not  very  dissimilar  length 
which  have  been  alreadv  dea^,witii^-,The  proportion  of  names 

I « >4  ^v*   '  \t 


VI  NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 

of  the  first,  or  of  a  very  high  second  class,  is  distinctly  larger  than 
in  the  eighteenth  century ;  the  bulk  of  literary  production  is 
infinitely  greater  than  in  the  Elizabethan  time.  Further,  save  in 
regard  to  the  earliest  subsections  of  this  period,  Time  has  not  per- 
formed his  office,  beneficent  to  the  reader  but  more  beneficent  to 
the  historian,  of  sifting  and  riddling  out  writers  whom  it  is  no 
longer  necessary  to  consider,  save  in  a  spirit  of  adventurous  or 
affectionate  antiquarianism.  I  must  ask  the  reader  to  believe  me 
when  I  say  that  many  who  do  not  appear  here  at  all,  or  who  are 
dismissed  in  a  few  lines,  have  yet  been  the  subjects  of  careful 
reading  on  my  part.  If  some  exclusions  (not  due  to  mere  over- 
sight) appear  arbitrary  or  unjust,  I  would  urge  that  this  is  not  a 
Dictionary  of  Authors,  nor  a  Catalogue  of  Books,  but  a  History  of 
Literature ;  and  that  to  mention  everybody  is  as  impossible  as  to 
say  everything.  As  I  have  revised  the  sheets  the  old  query  has 
recurred  to  myself  only  too  often,  and  sometimes  in  reference  to 
very  favourite  books  and  authors  of  my  own.  Where,  it  may  be 
asked,  is  Kenelm  Digby  and  the  Broad  Stone  of  Honour  ?  Where 
Sir  Richard  Burton  (as  great  a  contrast  to  Digby  as  can  well  be 
imagined)  ?  Where  Laurence  Oliphant,  who,  but  the  other  day, 
seemed  to  many  clever  men  the  cleverest  man  they  knew  ?  Where 
John  Foster,  who  provided  food  for  the  thoughtful  public  two 
generations  ago  ?  Where  Greville  of  the  caustic  diaries,  and  his 
editor  (latest  deceased)  Mr.  Reeve,  and  Crabb  Robinson,  and  many 
others  ?  Some  of  these  and  others  are  really  neiges  cVantan  ;  some 
baffle  the  historian  in  miniature  by  being  rebels  to  brief  and  exact 
characterisation ;  some,  nay  many,  are  simply  crowded  out. 

I  must  also  ask  pardon  for  having  exercised  apparently  arbi- 
trary discretion  in  alternately  separating  the  work  of  the  same  writer 
under  different,  chapter-headings,  and  grouping  it  with  a  certain 
disregard  of  the  strict  limits  of  the  chapter-heading  itself.  I  think 


PREFACE  Vll 

I  shall  obtain  this  pardon  from  those  who  remember  the  advantage 
obtainable  from  a  connected  view  of  the  progress  of  distinct  literary 
kinds,  and  that,  sometimes  not  to  be  foregone,  of  considering  the 
whole  work  of  certain  writers  together. 

To  provide  room  for  the  greater  press  of  material,  it  was 
necessary  to  make  some  slight  changes  of  omission  in  the  scheme 
of  the  earlier  volumes.  The  opportunity  of  considerable  gain  was 
suggested  in  the  department  of  extract — which  obviously  became 
less  necessary  in  the  case  of  authors  many  of  whom  are  familiar, 
and  hardly  any  accessible  with  real  difficulty.  Nor  did  it  seem 
necessary  to  take  up  room  with  the  bibliographical  index,  the 
utility  of  which  in  my  Elizabethan  volume  I  was  glad  to  find 
almost  universally  recognised.  This  would  have  had  to  be  greatly 
more  voluminous  here ;  and  it  was  much  less  necessary.  With  a 
very  few  exceptions,  all  the  writers  here  included  are  either  kept  in 
print,  or  can  be  obtained  without  much  trouble  at  the  second-hand 
bookshops. 

To  what  has  thus  been  said  as  to  the  principles  of  arrangement 
it  cannot  be  necessary  to  add  very  much  as  to  the  principles  of 
criticism.  They  are  the  same  as  those  which  I  have  always  en- 
deavoured to  maintain — that  is  to  say,  I  have  attempted  to  preserve 
a  perfectly  independent,  and,  as  far  as  possible,  a  rationally  uniform 
judgment,  taking  account  of  none  but  literary  characteristics,  but 
taking  account  of  all  characteristics  that  are  literary.  It  may  be, 
and  it  probably  is,  more  and  more  difficult  to  take  achromatic  views 
of  literature  as  it  becomes  more  and  more  modern ;  it  is  certainly 
more  difficult  to  get  this  achromatic  character,  even  where  it  exists, 
acknowledged  by  contemporaries.  But  it  has  at  least  been  my 
constant  effort  to  attain  it. 

In  the  circumstances,  and  with  a  view  to  avoid  not  merely 
repetition  but  confusion  and  dislocation  in  the  body  of  the  book, 


Vlll  NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 

I  have  thought  it  better  to  make  the  concluding  chapter  one  of  con- 
siderably greater  length  than  the  corresponding  part  of  the 
Elizabethan  volume,  and  to  reserve  for  it  the  greater  part  of  what 
may  be  called  connecting  and  comprehensive  criticism.  In  this 
will  be  found  what  may  be  not  improperly  described  from  one 
point  of  view  as  the  opening  of  the  case,  and  from  another  as  its 
summing  up— the  evidence  which  justifies  both  being  contained 
in  the  earlier  chapters. 

It  is  perhaps  not  improper  to  add  that  the  completion  of  this 
book  has  been  made  a  little  difficult  by  the  incidence  of  new 
duties,  not  in  themselves  unconnected  with  its  subject.  But  I 
have  done  my  best  to  prevent  or  supply  oversight. 

(December  1895.) 


NOTE   TO   THIRD    EDITION 

In  the  reprint  of  this  volume,  which  appeared  rather  less  than  a  year  after 
the  date  of  its  first  publication,  a  certain  number  of  errors  of  the  pen  and 
press,  which  had  betrayed  themselves,  were  corrected.  In  the  present,  as 
the  Nineteenth  Century  itself  has  come  to  an  end  in  the  meantime,  and  as  not 
a  few  persons  of  importance  have  disappeared  with  it,  it  seemed'  proper  to 
make  not  only  a  few  more  corrections,  but  the  additions  required  to  adjust  the 
book,  as  nearly  as  might  be,  to  its  title.  Such  adjustment  is  a  work  of  no 
little  difficulty,  and  having  spared  no  pains  on  it,  I  may  ask  the  benevolent 
reader  for  indulgence  to  any  small  slips.  In  the  process,  besides  giving  the 
necessary  notice  to  writers  deceased,  I  have  made  bold  to  avail  myself  of  the 
exception  I  took  formerly  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Ruskin,  so  as  to  include  Mr. 
Swinburne  and  Mr.  Meredith,  both  living  and  (let  us  hope)  King  to  live,  but 
both  illustrations  of  the  nineteenth  century  for  nearly  half  its  course,  and  both 
of  the  very  first  importance  for  a  due  exposition  of  its  developments  in  the  two 
great  divisions  of  imaginative  literature. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  I 

THE    END    OF    THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

PAGE 

The  Starting-point — Cowper  —  Crabbe — Blake — Burns — Minor  Poets 
— The  Political  Satirists — Gifford — Mathias — Dr.  Moore,  etc. — • 
Paine  —  Godwin — Holcroft — Beckford,  etc. — Mrs.  Radcliffe  and 
"  Monk  "  Lewis — Hannah  More — Gilpin  ....  I 

CHAPTER  II 

THE    NEW    POETRY 

Wordsworth — Coleridge — Southey — Scott — Byron — Shelley — Keats  — 
Rogers — Campbell — Moore — -Leigh  Hunt — Hogg — Landor — Minor 
Poets  born  before  Tennyson — Beddoes — Sir  Henry  Taylor — Mrs. 
Hemans  and  L.  E.  L.— Hood  and  Praed  .  .  .  .49 

CHAPTER  III 

THE    NEW    FICTION 

Interval  —  Maturin  —  Miss  Edgeworth  —  Miss  Austen  —  The  U'averley 
Novels — Hook — -Bulwer — Dickens  —  Thackeray —  Marryat  —  Lever 
— Minor  Xaval  Novelists  —  Disraeli — Peacock  —Borrow— Miss 
Martineau — Miss  Mitford  .  .  .  .  .  .125 


NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE    DEVELOPMENT    OF    PERIODICALS 

PAGE 

New  Periodicals  at  the  beginning  of  the  Century  — Cobbett— The  Edin- 
burgh Review—  Jeffrey — Sydney  Smith — The  Quarterly — Black- 
•zvood's  and  the  London  Magazines  —  Lamb -\Hazlitt — 'Wilson — 
Lockhart  — *  De  Quincey  —  Leigh  Hunt  —  HartleyV  Coleridge  — 
Maginn  and  Fra'ser — Sterling  and  the  Sterling  Club — Edward 
Fitz-Gerald — Barham  ......  166 

CHAPTER    V 

THE    HISTORIANS    OF    THE    CENTURY 

Occasional  Historians — Hallam — Roscoe— Mitford — Lingard — Turner 
— Palgrave  —  The  Tytlers  —  Alison  —  Milman  —  Grote  and  Thirl- 
wall  —  Arnold  —  Macaulay  —  Carlyle  —  Minor  Figures  —  Buckle— 
Kinglake —Freeman  and  Green-vFroude  .  .  .  .211 

CHAPTER    VI 

THE    SECOND    POETICAL    PERIOD 

Tennyson  —  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Browning — iMatthew  Arnold  —  The  Proe- 
Raphaelite  Movement — Rossetti — Morris — Mr.  Swinburne — Miss 
Rossetti — O'Shaughnessy — Thomson — Minor  Poets — Lord  Hough - 
ton — Aytoun— The  Spasmodics — Minor  Poets — dough  —Locker — 
The  Earl  of  Lytton — Patmore — Lord  de  Tabley — Humorous  Verse- 
Writers— "  C.  S.  C." — Mr.  Traill  —  Poetesses  .  .  .  253 

CHAPTER    VII 

THE    NOVEL    SINCE     1860 

Changes  in  the  Novel  —  Miss  Bronte — George  Eliot — Charles  Kingsley 
— The  Trollopes — Reade— Mf7-^h«*cJilh  —Mr.  Blackmore — Mi-s 
Yonge — Other  Novelists — V  Lewis  CarrulPS — Stevenson  .  .  327 


CONTENTS  xi 


CHAPTER  VIII 

PHILOSOPHY    AND    THEOLOGY 

PAGE 

Limits  of  this  and  following  Chapters — Bentham — Mackintosh — The 
Mills — Hamilton  and  the  Ilamiltonians — Mansel — Other  Philo- 
sophers— Jurisprudents  :  Austin,  Maine,  Stephen — Political  Econo- 
mists and  Malthus  —  IJhe  Oxford  Movement'^-*  Pusey  —  Keble  — 
Newman  —  The  Scottish  Disruption  — Chalmers — Irving  —  Other 
Divines — Maurice — Robertson  .....  362 


CHAPTER  IX 

LATER    JOURNALISM    AND    CRITICISM    IN    ART    AND 
LETTERS 

Changes  in  Periodicals — The  Saturday  Review — Critics  of  the  middle  of 
the  Century — Helps — Matthew  Arnold  in  Prose — Mr.  Ruskin— 
Jefferies — Pater — Symonds — Minto  '  ./  .  .  .  398 


CHAPTER  X 

SCHOLARSHIP    AND    SCIENCE 

Increasing  Difficulty  of  Selection- — Porson  —  Conington  —  Munro  — 
Sellar  —  Robertson  Smith  —  Davy  —  Mrs.  Somerville  —  Other 
Scientific  Writers — Darwin —  Vestiges  of  Creation — Hugh  Miller — 
Huxley  ........  424 


CHAPTER  XI 

DRAMA 

Weakness  of  this  department  throughout — O'Keefe — Joanna 
Knowles — Bulwer — Planche  .          '"•   .  . 


xii  NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 

CHAPTER  XII 
CONCLUSION 

PAGE 

Survey  and  Analysis  of  the  Period  in  the  several  divisions — Revolutions 

in  Style — The  present  state  of  Literature     .  .     '  445 

INDEX  .  .  4^1 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    END    OF    THE    EIGHTEENTH    CENTURY 

THE  period  of  English  literary  history  which  is  dealt  with  in  the 
opening  part  of  the  present  volume  includes,  of  necessity,  among 
its  most  illustrious  names,  not  a  few  whose  work  will  not  be  the 
subject  of  formal  discussion  here,  because  the  major  part  of  it  was 
done  within  the  scope  of  the  volume  which  preceded.  Thus,  to 
mention  only  one  of  these  names,  the  most  splendid  displays  of 
Burke's  power — the  efforts  in  which  he  at  last  gave  to  mankind 
what  had  previously  been  too  often  devoted  to  party — date  from 
this  time,  and  even  from  the  later  part  of  it ;  while  Gibbon  did 
not  die  till  1794,  and  Horace  Walpole  not  till  1797.  Even 
Johnson,  the  type  and  dictator  at  once  of  the  eighteenth  century 
in  literary  England,  survived  the  date  of  1780  by  four  years. 

Nevertheless  the  beginning  of  the  ninth  decade  of  the  century 
did  actually  correspond  with  a  real  change,  a  real  line  of  demar- 
cation. Not  only  did  the  old  writers  drop  off  one  by  one,  not 
only  did  no  new  writers  of  utterly  distinct  idiosyncrasy  (Burns 
and  Blake  excepted)  make  their  appearance  till  quite  the  end  of  it, 
but  it  was  also  marked  by  the  appearance  of  men  of  letters  and 
of  literary  styles  which  announced,  if  not  very  distinctly,  the 
coming  of  changes  of  the  most  sweeping  kind.  Hard  as  it  may 
be  to  exhibit  the  exact  contrast  between,  say,  Goldsmith  and  men 
like  Cowper  on  the  one  side  and  Crabbe  on  the  other,  that 
contrast  cannot  but  be  felt  by  every  reader  who  has  used  himself 
* 


THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 


in  the  very  least  to  the  consideration  of  literary  differences.  And 
as  with  individuals,  so  with  kinds.  No  special  production  of 
these  twenty  years  may  be  of  the  highest  value ;  but  there  is  a 
certain  idiosyncrasy,  if  only  an  idiosyncrasy  of  transition — an 
unlikeness  to  anything  that  comes  before,  and  to  anything, 
unless  directly  imitated,  that  comes  after — which  is  equally  dis- 
tinguishable in  the  curious  succession  of  poetical  satires  from 
Peter  Pindar  to  the  Anti-Jacobin,  in  the  terror-and-mystery  novels 
of  the  school  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  Monk  Lewis,  in  the  large, 
if  not  from  the  literary  point  of  view  extremely  noteworthy,  depart- 
ment of  politics  and  economics  which  in  various  ways  employed 
the  pens  of  writers  so  different  as  Moore,  Young,  Godwin, 
Priestley,  Home  Tooke,  Cobbett,  and  Paine. 

Giving  poetry,  as  usual,  the  precedence  even  in  the  most 
unpoetical  periods,  we  shall  find  in  the  four  names  already  cited — 
those  of  Crabbe,  Cowper,  Blake,  and  Burns — examples  of  which 
even  the  most  poetical  period  need  not  be  ashamed.  In  what 
may  be  called  the  absolute  spirit  of  poetry,  the  nestio  quid  which 
makes  the  greatest  poets,  no  one  has  ever  surpassed  Burns  and 
Blake  at  their  best ;  though  the  perfection  of  Burns  is  limited  in 
kind,  and  the  perfection  of  Blake  still  more  limited  in  duration 
and  sustained  force.  Cowper  would  have  been  a  great  poet  of 
the  second  class  at  any  time,  and  in  some  times  might  have 
attained  the  first.  As  for  Crabbe,  he  very  seldom  has  the  absolute 
spirit  of  poetry  just  mentioned  ;  but  the  vigour  and  the  distinction 
of  his  verse,  as  well  as  his  wonderful  faculty  of  observation  in 
rendering  scene  and  character,  are  undeniable.  And  it  is  not 
perhaps  childish  to  point  out  that  there  is  something  odd  and  out 
of  the  way  about  the  poetical  career  of  all  these  poets  of  the 
transition.  Cowper's  terrible  malady  postpones  his  first  efforts  in 
song  to  an  age  when  most  poets  are  losing  their  voices ;  Crabbe, 
beginning  brilliantly  and  popularly,  relapses  into  a  silence  of  nearly 
a  quarter  of  a  century  before  breaking  out  with  greater  power  and 
skill  than  ever  ;  Burns  runs  one  of  the  shortest,  if  one  of  the  most 
brilliant,  Blake  one  of  the  longest,  the  strangest,  the  most  inter- 


I  COWPER  3 

mittent,  of  poetical  careers.  Nor  is  it  superfluous  to  draw  atten- 
tion further  to  the  fact  that  when  we  leave  this  little  company — 
at  the  best  august,  at  the  worst  more  than  respectable — we  drop 
suddenly  to  the  flattest  and  most  hopeless  bog  of  poesiless  verse 
that  lies  anywhere  on  the  map  of  England's  literature.  Passing 
from  the  ethereal  music  of  the  Scottish  ploughman  and  the  English 
painter,  from  Cowper's  noble  or  gentle  thought  and  his  accom- 
plished versification,  from  Crabbe's  manly  vigour  and  his  Rem- 
brandt touch,  we  find  nothing,  unless  it  be  the  ingenious  but  not 
strictly  poetical  burlesque  of  the  Wolcots  and  the  Lawrences,  till 
we  come  to  the  drivel  of  Hayley  and  the  drouth  of  Darwin. 

Of  the  quartette,  William  Cowper  was  by  far  the  oldest ;  the 
other  three  being  contemporaries  within  a  few  years.  He  was 
born  on  26th  November  1731  at  Great  Berkhampstead.  His 
father  was  a  clergyman  and  a  royal  chaplain,  his  mother  one  of 
the  Norfolk  Donnes.  Her  early  death,  and  that  school  discom- 
fort which  afterwards  found  vent  in  Tirocinium,  appear  to  have 
aggravated  a  natural  melancholia ;  though  after  leaving  West- 
minster, and  during  his  nominal  studies  at  both  branches  of  the 
law,  he  seems  to  have  been  cheerful  enough.  How  what  should 
have  been  the  making  of  his  fortune, — his  appointment  as  Clerk 
of  the  Journals  to  the  House  of  Lords, — not  unassisted  by  religious 
mania,  drove  him  through  sheer  nervousness  to  attempt  suicide, 
is  one  of  the  best  known  things  in  English  literary  biography,  as 
indeed  are  most  of  the  few  events  of  his  sad  life, — owing  partly  to 
his  own  charming  letters,  partly  to  the  biographies  of  Southey 
and  others.  His  latest  days  were  his  unhappiest,  and  after  years 
of  more  or  less  complete  loss  of  reason  he  died  on  2yth  April 
1800. 

It  has  been  said  that  Cowper  did  not  take  to  writing  till  late 
in  life.  He  had  had  literary  friends — Churchill,  Lloyd,  and 
others — in  youth,  and  must  always  have  had  literary  sympathies  ; 
but  it  was  not  till  he  was  nearly  fifty,  nor  till  the  greater  part  of 
twenty  years  after  his  first  mental  seizure,  that  he  attempted  com- 
position at  the  instance  of  his  friend  Newton  and  the  Urnvins 


4  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP. 

Beginning  with  hymns  and  trifles,  he  before  long  undertook,  at 
this  or  that  person's  suggestion,  longer  poems,  such  as  Truth,  The 
Progress  of  Error,  and  Expostulation^  which  were  finished  by  1781 
and  published  next  year,  to  be  followed  by  the  still  better  and 
more  famous  Task,  suggested  to  him  by  Lady  Austen.  This 
appeared  in  1785,  and  was  very  popular.  He  had  already  begun 
to  translate  Homer,  which  occupied  him  for  the  greater  part  of 
seven  years.  Nothing  perhaps  settled  him  more  in  the  public 
affections  than  "John  Gilpin,"  the  subject  of  which  he  also  owed 
to  Lady  Austen  ;  and  he  continued  to  write  occasional  pieces  of 
exquisite  accomplishment.  Almost  the  last,  if  not  actually  the 
last,  of  these,  written  just  before  the  final  obscuration  of  his 
faculties,  was  the  beautiful  and  terrible  "  Castaway,"  an  avowed 
allegory  of  his  own  condition. 

Cowper,  even  more  than  most  writers,  deserves  and  requites 
consideration  under  the  double  aspect  of  matter  and  form.  In 
both  he  did  much  to  alter  the  generally  accepted  conditions  of 
English  poetry  ;  and  if  his  formal  services  have  perhaps  received 
less  attention  than  they  merit,  his  material  achievements  have 
never  been  denied.  His  disposition — in  which,  by  a  common 
enough  contrast,  the  blackest  and  most  hopeless  melancholy  was 
accompanied  by  the  merriest  and  most  playful  humour — reflected 
itself  unequally  in  his  verse,  the  lighter  side  chiefly  being  exhibited. 
Except  in  "The  Castaway"  and  a  few — not  many — of  the  hymns, 
Cowper  is  the  very  reverse  of  a  gloomy  poet.  His  amiability, 
however,  could  also  pass  into  very  strong  moral  indignation,  and 
he  endeavoured  to  give  voice  to  this  in  a  somewhat  novel  kind  of 
satire,  more  serious  and  earnest  than  that  of  Tope,  much  less 
political  and  personal  than  that  of  Dryden,  lighter  and  more 
restrained  than  that  of  the  Elizabethans.  His  own  unworldly 
disposition,  together  with  the  excessively  retired  life  which  he  had 
led  since  early  manhood,  rather  damaged  the  chances  of  Cowper 
as  a  satirist.  We  always  feel  that  his  censure  wants  actuality, 
that  it  is  an  exercise  rather  than  an  experience.  His  efforts  in  it, 
however,  no  doubt  assisted,  and  were  assisted  by,  that  alteration 


EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  CONVENTION 


of  the  fashionable  Popian  couplet  which,  after  the  example  partly 
of  Churchill  and  with  a  considerable  return  to  Dryden,  he 
attempted,  made  popular,  and  handed  on  to  the  next  generation 
to  dis-Pope  yet  further.  This  couplet,  paralleled  by  a  not 
wholly  dissimilar  refashioning  of  blank  verse,  in  which,  though 
not  deserting  Milton,  he  beat  out  for  himself  a  scheme  quite 
different  from  Thomson's,  perhaps  show  at  their  best  in  the 
descriptive  matter  of  The  Task  and  similar  poems.  It  was  in 
these  that  Cowper  chiefly  displayed  that  faculty  of  "bringing 
back  the  eye  to  the  object "  and  the  object  to  the  eye,  in  which 
he  has  been  commonly  and  justly  thought  to  be  the  great  English 
restorer.  Long  before  the  end  of  the  Elizabethan  period,  poetical 
observation  of  nature  had  ceased  to  be  just ;  and,  after  substituting 
for  justness  the  wildest  eccentricities  of  conceit,  it  went  for  a  long 
time  into  another  extreme — that  of  copying  and  recopying  certain 
academic  conventionalities,  instead  of  even  attempting  the  natural 
model.  It  is  not  true,  as  Wordsworth  and  others  have  said,  that 
Dryden  himself  could  not  draw  from  the  life.  He  could  and 
did ;  but  his  genius  was  not  specially  attracted  to  such  drawing, 
his  subjects  did  not  usually  call  for  it,  and  his  readers  did  not 
want  it.  It  is  not  true  that  Thomson  could  not  "  see  " ;  nor  is  it 
true  of  all  his  contemporaries  and  immediate  followers  that  they 
were  blind.  But  the  eighteenth  century  had  slipped  into  a  fault 
which  was  at  least  as  fatal  as  that  of  the  Idealist-Impressionists  of 
the  seventeenth,  or  as  that  of  the  Realist-Impressionists  of  our 
own  time.  The  former  neglected  universality  in  their  hunt  after 
personal  conceits  ;  the  latter  neglect  it  in  the  endeavour  to  add 
nothing  to  rigidly  elaborated  personal  sensation.  The  one  kind 
outstrips  nature ;  the  other  comes  short  of  art.  From  Dryden  to 
Cowper  the  fault  was  different  from  both  of  these.  It  neglected 
the  personal  impression  and  the  attention  to  nature  too  much. 
It  dared  not  present  either  without  stewing  them  in  a  sauce  of 
stock  ideas,  stock  conventions,  stock  words  and  phrases,  which 
equally  missed  the  universal  and  the  particular.  Cowper  and 
the  other  great  men  who  •were  his  contemporaries  by  publication 


Till':  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 


if  not  by  birth,  set  to  work  to  cure  this  fault.  Even  the  weakest 
of  them  could  never  have  been  guilty  of  such  a  passage  as  that 
famous  one  which  Congreve  (as  clever  a  man  as  any)  wrote,  and 
which  Johnson  (as  clever  a  man  as  any)  admired.  The  sentiment 
which  actuated  them  was,  if  we  may  trust  Coleridge's  account  of 
Boyer  or  Bowyer,  the  famous  tyrant  of  Christ's  Hospital,  well 
diffused.  "'Nymph,'  boy?  You  mean  your  nurse's  daughter," 
puts  in  a  somewhat  brutal  and  narrow  form  the  correction  which 
the  time  needed,  and  which  these  four  in  their  different  ways 
applied. 

We  have  already  glanced  at  the  way  in  which  Cowper  applied 
it  in  his  larger  poems  :  he  did  it  equally  well,  and  perhaps  more 
tellingly,  in  his  smaller.  The  day  on  which  a  poet  of  no  mean 
pretensions,  one  belonging  altogether  to  the  upper  classes  of 
English  society,  and  one  whose  lack  of  university  education 
mattered  the  less  because  the  universities  were  just  then  at  their 
nadir,  dared  to  write  of  the  snake  he  killed 

"  And  taught  him  never  to  come  there  no  more  " 

was  an  epoch-making  day.  Swift  would  have  done  it ;  but  Swift 
was  in  many  ways  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilderness,  and  Swift  was 
not,  strictly  speaking,  a  poet  at  all.  Byrom  would  have  done  it ; 
but  Byrom  was  emphatically  a  minor  poet.  Cowper  could — at 
least  in  and  for  his  day — boast  the  major  afflatus,  and  Cowper 
did  not  disdain  vernacular  truth.  He  never  could  have  been 
vulgar ;  there  is  not  in  the  whole  range  of  English  literature  quite 
such  a  gentleman  in  his  own  way  as  Cowper.  But  he  has  escaped 
almost  entirely  from  the  genteel  style— from  the  notion  of  things 
as  below  the  dignity  of  literature. 

His  prose  in  this  respect  is  at  least  equal  to  his  verse,  though, 
as  it  was  known  much  later,  it  has  greater  tendency  than  influence. 
All  good  critics  have  agreed  that  his  letters  are  not  surpassed, 
perhaps  not  surpassable.  He  has  more  freedom  thandray;  he 
has  none  of  the  coxcombry  of  Walpole  and  Byron  ;  and  there  is 
no  fifth  name  that  can  be  put  even  into  competition  with  him. 


I  CRABBE  7 

iiase,  correctness,  facility  of  expression,  freedom  from  convention 
ivithin  his  range,  harmony,  truth  to  nature,  truth  to  art : — these 
things  meet  in  the  hapless  recluse  of  Olney  as  they  had  not  met 
for  a  century — perhaps  as  they  had  never  met — in  English  epistles. 
The  one  thing  that  he  wanted  was  strength  :  as  his  madness  was 
melancholy,  not  raving,  so  was  his  sanity  mild  but  not  triumphant. 

George  Crabbe  was  three-and-twenty  years  younger  than 
Cowper,  having  been  born  on  Christmas  Eve  1754.  But  his  first 
publication,  The  Library^  the  success  of  which  was  due  to  the 
generous  and  quick-sighted  patronage  of  Burke  after  the  poet 
had  wrestled  with  a  hard  youth,  coincided  almost  exactly  with  the 
first  appearance  of  Cowper,  and  indeed  a  little  anticipated  it. 
The  Village  appeared  in  1783,  and  The  Newspaper  in  1785,  and 
then  Crabbe  (who  had  taken  orders,  had  been  instituted  to 
livings  in  the  East  of  England,  and  had  married,  after  a  long 
engagement,  his  first  love)  was  silent  for  two  and  twenty  years. 
He  began  again  in  1807  with  The  Parish  Register.  The  Borough, 
his  greatest  work,  appeared  in  1810.  Shifting  from  the  East 
of  England  to  the  West  in  1813,  he  spent  the  last  twenty  years  of 
his  long  life  at  Trowbridge  in  Wiltshire,  and  died  in  1832  at  the 
age  of  seventy-eight. 

The  external  (and,  as  will  be  presently  remarked,  something 
more  than  the  external)  uniformity  of  his  work  is  great,  and  its 
external  conformity  to  the  traditions  and  expectations  of  the  time 
at  which  it  first  appeared  is  almost  greater.  A  hasty  judgment, 
and  even  one  which,  though  not  hasty,  is  not  very  keen-sighted, 
might  see  little  difference  between  Crabbe  and  any  poet  from 
Pope  to  Goldsmith  except  the  innovators.  He  is  all  but  constant 
to  the  heroic  couplet — the  Spenserian  introduction  to  77/6'  Birth 
of  Flattery,  the  variously -grouped  octosyllabic  quatrains  of 
Reflections,  Sir  Eustace  Grey,  The  Hall  of  Justice,  and  Woman, 
with  a  few  other  deviations,  being  merely  islets  among  a  wide  sea 
of  rhymed  decasyllabics  constituting  at  least  nineteen-twentieths 
of  the  poet's  outpouring.  Moreover,  he  was  as  a  rule  constant, 
not  merely  to  the  couplet,  but  to  what  lias  been  called  the  "shut  " 


8  THE  END  OK  T11K  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 


couplet — the  couplet  more  or  less  rigidly  confined  to  itself,  and 
not  overlapping.  But  he  did  sometimes  overlap,  and  either  in 
fealty  to  Dryden,  or  from  a  secret  feeling  of  the  craving  for  freedom 
which  his  more  lawless  contemporaries  expressed  in  other  ways, 
he  reverted  to  the  Drydenian  triplet  and  Alexandrine  on  which 
Pope  had  frowned.  In  Crabbe's  couplet,  too,  there  is  something 
which  distinguishes  it  from  almost  all  others.  This  something 
varies  very  much  in  appeal.  It  is  sometimes,  nay,  too  often,  a 
rather  ludicrous  something,  possessing  a  sort  of  awkward  prosaic 
"  flop,"  which  is  excellently  caricatured  in  Rejected  Addresses. 
But  it  always  shows  signs  of  a  desire  to  throw  the  emphasis  with 
more  variation  than  the  icy  uniformity  of  the  Popian  cadence 
admitted ;  and  it  is  sometimes  curiously  effective. 

Crabbe's  position,  independently  of  the  strange  gap  in  his 
publication  (which  has  been  variously  accounted  for),  is  not  a 
little  singular.  The  greater  and  the  better  part  of  his  work  was 
composed  when  the  Romantic  revival  was  in  full  swing,  but  it 
shows  little  or  no  trace  of  the  influence  of  that  revival  in  versifica- 
tion or  diction.  His  earliest  attempts  do  indeed  show  the  same 
reaction  from  Pope  to  Dryden  (of  whom  we  know  that  he  was  an 
eager  student)  which  is  visible  in  Cowper  and  Churchill ;  and 
throughout  his  work,  both  earlier  and  later,  there  is  a  ruthless 
discarding  of  conventional  imagery  and  a  stern  attention  to  the 
realities  of  scenery  and  character.  But  Crabbe  has  none  of  the 
Grace  of  the  new  dispensation,  if  he  has  some  glimpses  of  its 
Law.  He  sails  so  close  to  the  wind  of  poetry  that  he  is  some- 
times merely  prosaic  and  often  nearly  so.  His  conception  of  life 
is  anti-idealist  almost  to  pessimism,  and  he  has  no  fancy.  The 
"jewels  five  words  long  "  are  not  his  :  indeed  there  clung  to  him  a 
certain  obscurity  of  expression  which  Johnson  is  said  to  have  good- 
naturedly  smoothed  out  in  his  first  work  to  some  extent,  but  from 
which  he  never  got  quite  free.  The  extravagances  as  well  as  the 
graces  of  the  new  poetry  were  quite  alien  from  him  ;  its  exotic 
tastes  touched  him  not ;  its  love  for  antiquity  (though  he  knew 
old  English  poetry  by  no  means  ill)  seems  to  have  left  him 


BLAKE BURNS 


wholly  cold.  The  anxieties  and  sufferings  of  lower  and  middle- 
class  life,  the  "  natural  death  of  love  "  (which,  there  seems  some 
reason  to  fear,  he  had  experienced),  the  common  English  country 
scenery  and  society  of  his  time — these  were  his  subjects,  and  he 
dealt  with  them  in  a  fashion  the  mastery  of  which  is  to  this  day 
a  joy  to  all  competent  readers.  No  writer  of  his  time  had  an 
influence  which  so  made  for  truth  pure  and  simple,  yet  not 
untouched  by  the  necessary  "  disprosing  "  processes  of  art.  For 
Crabbe  is  not  a  mere  realist ;  and  whoso  considers  him  as  such 
has  not  apprehended  him.  But  he  was  a  realist  to  this  extent, 
that  he  always  went  to  the  model  and  never  to  the  pattern- 
drawing  on  the  Academy  walls.  And  that  was  what  his  time 
needed.  His  general  characteristics  are  extremely  uniform  :  even 
the  external  shape  and  internal  subject-matter  of  his  poems  are 
almost  confined  to  the  shape  and  matter  of  the  verse-tale.  He 
need  not,  and  indeed  cannot,  in  a  book  like  this,  be  dealt  with  at 
much  length.  But  he  is  a  very  great  writer,  and  a  most  important 
figure  at  this  turning-point  of  English  literature. 

Yet,  however  one  may  sympathise  with  Cowper,  however  much 
one  may  admire  Crabbe,  it  is  difficult  for  any  true  lover  of  poetry 
not  to  feel  the  sense  of  a  "  Pisgah  sight,"  and  something  more,  of 
the  promised  land  of  poetry,  in  passing  from  these  writers  to 
William  Blake  and  Robert  Burns.  Here  there  is  no  more  allow- 
ance necessary,  except  in  the  first  case  for  imperfection  of  accom- 
plishment, in  the  second  for  shortness  of  life  and  comparative 
narrowness  of  range.  The  quality  and  opportuneness  of  poetry 
are  in  each  case  undeniable.  Since  the  deaths  of  Herrick  and 
Vaughan,  England  had  not  seen  any  one  who  had  the  finer  lyrical 
gifts  of  the  poet  as  Blake  had  them.  Since  the  death  of  Dunbar, 
Scotland  had  not  seen  such  strength  and  intensity  of  poetic  genius 
(joined  in  this  case  to  a  gift  of  melody  which  Dunbar  never  had) 
as  were  shown  by  Burns.  There  was  scarcely  more  than  a 
twelvemonth  between  their  births;  for  Blake  was  born  in  1757 
(the  day  appears  not  to  be  known),  and  Burns  in  January  1759. 
But  Blake  long  outlived  Hums,  and  did  not  die  till  iSjS,  while 


to  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP. 

Burns  was  no  more  in  July  1796.  Neither  the  long  life  nor  the 
short  one  provided  any  events  which  demand  chronicling  here. 
Both  poets  were  rather  fortunate  in  their  wives,  though  Blake 
clave  to  Catherine  Boucher  more  constantly  than  Burns  to  his 
Jean.  Neither  was  well  provided  with  this  world's  goods;  Burns 
wearing  out  his  short  life  in  difficulties  as  farmer  and  as  excise- 
man, while  all  the  piety  of  biographers  has  left  it  something  of 
a  mystery  how  Blake  got  through  his  long  life  with  no  better 
resources  than  a  few  very  poorly  paid  private  commissions  for  his 
works  of  design,  the  sale  of  his  hand-made  books  of  poetry  and 
prophecy,  and  such  occasional  employment  in  engraving  as  his 
unconventional  style  and  his  still  more  unconventional  habits  and 
temper  allowed  him  to  accept  or  to  keep.  In  some  respects  the  two 
were  different  enough  according  to  commonplace  standards,  less  so 
perhaps  according  to  others.  The  forty  years  of  Burns,  and  the 
more  than  seventy  of  Blake,  were  equally  passed  in  a  rapture  ;  but 
morality  has  less  quarrel  with  Blake,  who  was  essentially  a  "  God- 
intoxicated  man  "  and  spent  his  life  in  one  long  dream  of  art 
and  prophecy,  than  with  Burns,  who  was  generally  in  love,  and 
not  unfrequently  in  liquor.  But  we  need  no  more  either  of 
antithesis  or  of  comparison  :  the  purely  literary  matter  calls  us. 

It  was  in  1783 — a  date  which,  in  its  close  approximation  to 
the  first  appearances  of  Crabbe  and  Cowper,  makes  the  literary 
student  think  of  another  group  of  first  appearances  in  the  early 
"eighties"  of  the  sixteenth  century  foreshadowing  the  out- 
burst of  Elizabethan  literature — that  Blake's  first  book  appeared. 
His  Poetical  Sketches,  now  one  of  the  rarest  volumes  of  English 
poetry,  was  printed  by  subscription  among  a  literary  coterie  who 
met  at  the  house  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Mathew  ;  but  the  whole  edition 
was  given  to  the  author,  lie  had  avowedly  taken  little  or  no 
trouble  to  correct  it,  and  the  text  is  nearly  as  corrupt  as  that  of 
the  Suppliccs ;  nor  does  it  seem  that  he  took  any  trouble  to  make 
it  "go  off,"  nor  that  it  did  go  off  in  any  appreciable  manner. 
Yet  if  many  ears  had  then  been  open  to  true  poetical  music,  some 
of  them  could  not  have  mistaken  sounds  the  like  of  which  had 


I  BLAKE  1 1 

not,  as  has  been  said,  been  heard  since  the  deaths  of  Herrick  and 
Vaughan.  The  merit  of  the  contents  is  unequal  to  a  degree  not 
to  be  accounted  for  by  the  mere  neglect  to  prepare  carefully  for 
press,  and  the  influence  of  Ossian  is,  as  throughout  Blake's  work, 
much  more  prominent  for  evil  than  for  good.  But  the  chaotic 
play  of  Edward  tJie  Third  is  not  mere  Elizabethan  imitation  ;  and 
at  least  half  a  dozen  of  the  songs  and  lyrical  pieces  are  of  the 
most  exquisite  quality — snatches  of  Shakespeare  or  Fletcher  as 
Shakespeare  or  Fletcher  might  have  written  them  in  Blake's  time. 
The  finest  of  all  no  doubt  is  the  magnificent  "Mad  Song."  But 
others — "  How  sweet  I  roamed  from  Field  to  Field "  (the  most 
eighteenth  century  in  manner,  but  showing  how  even  that  manner 
could  be  strengthened  and  sweetened) ;  "  My  Silks  and  Fine 
Array,"  beautiful,  but  more  like  an  Elizabethan  imitation  than 
most ;  "  Memory  Hither  Come,"  a  piece  of  ineffable  melody — 
these  are  things  which  at  once  showed  Blake  to  be  free  of  the 
very  first  company  of  poets,  to  be  a  poet  who  for  real  essence  of 
poetry  excelled  everything  the  century  had  yet  seen,  and  every- 
thing, with  the  solitary  exception  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads  at  its 
extreme  end,  that  it  was  to  see. 

Unfortunately  it  was  not  by  any  means  as  a  poet  that  Blake 
regarded  himself.  He  knew  that  he  was  an  artist,  and  he  thought 
that  he  was  a  prophet ;  and  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  deviating  only 
now  and  then  into  engraving  as  a  mere  breadwinner,  he  devoted 
himself  to  the  joint  cultivation  of  these  two  gifts,  inventing  for 
the  purpose  a  method  or  vehicle  of  publication  excellently  suited 
to  his  genius,  but  in  other  respects  hardly  convenient.  This 
method  was  to  execute  text  and  illustrations  at  once  on  copper- 
plates, which  were  then  treated  in  slightly  different  fashions. 
Impressions  worked  off  from  these  by  hand-press  were  coloured 
by  hand,  Blake  and  his  wife  executing  the  entire  process.  In 
this  fashion  were  produced  the  lovely  little  gems  of  literature  and 
design  called  Songs  of  Innocence  (1789)  and  Songs  of  Experience 
(1794);  in  this  way  for  the  most  part,  but  with  some  modifica- 
tions, the  vast  and  formidable  mass  of  the  so-called  "  Prophetic  " 


12  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP 


Books.  With  the  artistic  qualities  of  Blake  we  are  not  here  con- 
cerned, but  it  is  permissible  to  remark  that  they  resemble  his 
literary  qualities  with  a  closeness  which  at  once  explains  and  is 
explained  by  their  strangely  combined  method  of  production. 
That  Blake  was  not  entirely  sane  has  never  been  doubted  except 
by  a  few  fanatics  of  mysticism,  who  seem  to  think  that  the  denial 
of  complete  sanity  implies  a  complete  denial  of  genius.  And 
though  he  was  never,  in  the  common  phrase,  "incapable  of  man- 
aging" such  very  modest  affairs  as  were  his,  the  defect  appears 
most  in  the  obstinate  fashion  in  which  he  refused  to  perfect  and 
co-ordinate  his  work.  He  could,  when  he  chose  and  would  give 
himself  the  trouble,  draw  quite  exquisitely ;  and  he  always  drew 
with  marvellous  vigour  and  imagination.  But  he  would  often 
permit  himself  faults  of  drawing  quite  inexplicable  and  not  very 
tolerable.  So,  too,  though  he  had  the  finest  gift  of  literary  ex- 
pression, he  chose  often  to  babble  and  still  oftener  to  rant  at  large. 
Even  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Experience — despite  their  double 
charm  to  the  eye  and  the  ear,  and  the  presence  of  such  things  as 
the  famous  "Tiger,"  as  the  two  "Introductions"  (two  of  Blake's 
best  things),  and  as  "The  Little  Girl  Lost" — show  a  certain 
poetical  declension  from  the  highest  heights  of  the  Poetical 
Sketches.  The  poet  is  no  longer  a  poet  pure  and  simple ;  he  has 
got  purposes  and  messages,  and  these  partly  strangle  and  partly 
render  turbid  the  clear  and  spontaneous  jets  of  poetry  which 
refresh  us  in  the  "Mad  Song  "  and  the  "Memory."  And  after 
the  Songs  Blake  did  not  care  to  put  forth  anything  bearing  the 
ordinary  form  of  poetry.  We  possess  indeed  other  poetical  work 
of  his,  recovered  in  scraps  and  fragments  from  MSS.  ;  and  some 
of  it  is  beautiful.  But  it  is  as  a  rule  more  chaotic  than  the  Sketches 
themselves;  it  is  sometimes  defaced  (being  indeed  mere  private 
jottings  never  intended  for  print)  by  personality  and  coarse- 
ness ;  and  it  is  constantly  puddled  with  the  jargon  of  Blake's 
mystical  philosophy,  which,  borrowing  some  of  its  method  from 
Sweden borg  and  much  of  its  imagery  and  nomenclature  from 
Ossian,  spreads  itself  unhampered  by  any  form  whatever  over  the 


I  BURNS  13 

Prophetic  Books.  The  literary  merit  of  these  in  parts  is  often  very 
high,  and  their  theosophy  (for  that  is  the  best  single  word  for  it)  is 
not  seldom  majestic.  But  despite  the  attempts  of  some  disciples 
to  evolve  a  regular  system  from  them,  students  of  philosophy  as 
well  as  of  literature  are  never  likely  to  be  at  much  odds  as  to 
their  real  character.  "  Ravings  "  they  are  not,  and  they  are  very 
often  the  reverse  of  "nonsense."  But  they  are  the  work  of  a 
man  who  in  the  first  place  was  very  slightly  acquainted  with  the 
literature  and  antecedents  of  his  subject,  who  in  the  second  was 
distinctly  non  compos  on  the  critical,  though  admirably  gifted  on 
the  creative  side  of  his  brain,  and  who  in  the  third  had  the  ill 
luck  to  fall  under  the  fullest  sway  of  the  Ossianic  influence.  To 
any  one  who  loves  and  admires  Blake — and  the  present  writer 
deliberately  ranks  him  as  the  greatest  and  most  delectable  poet 
of  the  eighteenth  century  proper  in  England,  reserving  Burns  as 
specially  Scotch — it  must  always  be  tempting  to  say  more  of  him 
than  can  be  allowed  on  such  a  scale  as  the  present ;  but  the  scale 
must  be  observed. 

There  is  all  the  more  reason  for  the  observance  that  Blake 
exercised  on  the  literary  history  of  his  time  no  influence,  and 
occupied  in  it  no  position.  He  always  had  a  few  faithful  friends 
and  patrons  who  kept  him  from  starvation  by  their  commissions, 
admired  him,  believed  in  him,  and  did  him  such  good  turns  as 
his  intensely  independent  and  rather  irritable  disposition  would 
allow.  But  the  public  had  little  opportunity  of  seeing  his  pictures, 
and  less  of  reading  his  books  ;  and  though  the  admiration  of  Lamb 
led  to  some  appreciation  from  Southey  and  others,  he  was  practi- 
cally an  unread  man.  This  cannot  be  said  of  Robert  Burns,  who, 
born  as  was  said  a  year  or  two  after  Blake,  made  his  first  literary 
venture  three  years  after  him,  in  1786.  Most  people  know  that  the 
publication,  now  famous  and  costly,  called  "the  Kilmarnock 
Edition"  was  originally  issued  in  the  main  hope  of  paying  the  poet's 
passage  to  Jamaica  after  an  unfortunate  youth  of  struggle,  and 
latterly  of  dissipation.  Nay,  even  after  the  appearance  of  the 
Poems  and  their  welcome  he  still  proposed  to  go  abroad.  He  was 


14  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAI-. 


summoned  back  to  Edinburgh  to  reprint  them,  to  make  a  consider- 
able profit  by  them,  and  to  be  lionised  without  stint  by  the  society 
of  the  Scottish  capital.  He  then  settled  down,  marrying  Jean 
Armour,  at  Ellisland  in  Dumfriesshire,  on  a  small  farm  and  a  post 
in  the  Excise,  which,  when  his  farming  failed  and  he  moved  to 
Dumfries  itself,  became  his  only  regular  means  of  support.  He 
might  have  increased  this  considerably  by  literature  ;  but  as  it  was 
he  actually  gave  away,  or  disposed  of  for  trifling  equivalents,  most 
of  the  exquisite  songs  which  he  wrote  in  his  later  years.  These 
years  were  unhappy.  He  hailed  the  French  Revolution  with  a 
perfectly  innocent,  because  obviously  ignorant,  Jacobinism  which, 
putting  all  other  considerations  aside,  was  clearly  improper  in  a 
salaried  official  of  the  Crown,  and  thereby  got  into  disgrace  with 
the  authorities,  and  also  with  society  in  and  about  Dumfries.  His 
habits  of  living,  though  their  recklessness  has  been  vastly  exagger- 
ated, were  not  careful,  and  helped  to  injure  both  his  reputation 
and  his  health.  Before  long  he  broke  down  completely,  and  died 
on  the  first  of  July  1796,  his  poetical  powers  being  to  the  very  last 
in  fullest  perfection. 

Burns'  work,  which  even  in  bulk — its  least  remarkable  char- 
acteristic— is  very  considerable  when  his  short  life  and  Ins  un- 
favourable education  and  circumstances  are  reckoned,  fails  at 
once  into  three  sharply  contrasted  sections.  There  are  his  poems 
in  Scots ;  there  are  the  verses  that,  in  obedience  partly  to  the 
incompetent  criticism  of  his  time,  partly  to  a  very  natural  mistake 
of  ambition  and  ignorance,  he  tried  to  write  in  conventional 
literary  English  ;  and  there  is  his  prose,  taking  the  form  of  more 
or  less  studied  letters.  The  second  class  of  the  poems  is  almost 
worthless,  and  fortunately  it  is  not  bulky.  The  letters  are  of 
unequal  value,  and  have  been  variously  estimated.  They  show 
indeed  that,  like  almost  all  poets,  he  might,  if  choice  and  fate- 
had  united,  have  become  a  very  considerable  prose -writer,  and 
they  have  immense  autobiographic  value.  But  they  are  some- 
times, and  perhaps  often,  written  as  much  in  falsetto  as  the  division 
of  verse  just  ruled  out  ;  their  artificiality  does  not  take  very  good 


i  BURNS  15 

models;  and  their  literary  attraction  is  altogether  second-rate. 
How  far  different  the  value  of  the  Scots  poems  is,  four  generations 
have  on  the  whole  securely  agreed.  The  moral  discomfort  of 
Principal  Shairp,  the  academic  distaste  of  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold 
for  a  world  of  "Scotch  wit,  Scotch  religion,  and  Scotch  drink," 
and  the  purely  indolent  and  ignorant  reluctance  of  others  to 
grapple  with  Scottish  dialect,  need  not  trouble  the  catholic  critic 
much.  The  two  first  may  be  of  some  use  as  cautions  and  drags ; 
the  third  may  be  thrown  aside  at  once.  Scots,  though  a  dialect, 
is  not  a  patois ;  it  has  a  great  and  continuous  literature ;  it  com- 
bines in  an  extraordinary  degree  the  consonant  virtues  of  English 
and  the  vowel  range  of  the  Latin  tongues.  It  is  true  that  Burns' 
range  of  subject,  as  distinct  from  that  of  sound,  was  not  extremely 
wide.  He  could  give  a  voice  to  passion — passion  of  war,  passion  of 
conviviality,  passion  above  all  of  love — as  none  but  the  very  greatest 
poets  ever  have  given  or  will  give  it ;  he  had  also  an  extraordinary 
command  of  genre-painting  of  all  kinds,  ranging  from  the  merely 
descriptive  and  observant  to  the  most  intensely  satirical.  Perhaps 
he  could  only  do  these  two  things — could  not  be  (as  he  certainly 
has  not  been)  philosophical,  deeply  meditative,  elaborately  in 
command  of  the  great  possibilities  of  nature,  political,  moral, 
argumentative.  But  what  an  "  only  "  have  we  here  !  It  amounts 
to  this,  that  Burns  could  "  only  "  seize,  could  "  only  "  convey  the 
charms  of  poetical  expression  to,  the  more  primitive  thought  and 
feeling  of  the  natural  man,  and  that  he  could  do  this  supremely. 
His  ideas  are — to  use  the  rough  old  Lockian  division — ideas  of 
sensation,  not  of  reflection ;  and  when  he  goes  beyond  them  he  is 
sensible,  healthy,  respectable,  but  not  deep  or  high.  In  his  own 
range  there  are  few  depths  or  heights  to  which  he  has  not  soared 
or  plunged. 

That  he  owed  a  good  deal  to  his  own  Scottish  predecessors, 
especially  to  Ferguson,  is  not  now  denied ;  and  his  methods  of 
composing  his  songs  are  very  different  from  those  which  a  lesser 
man,  using  more  academic  forms,  could  venture  upon  without 
the  certainty  of  the  charge  of  plagiarism.  We  shall  never  under 


16  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP 

stand  Burns  aright  if  we  do  not  grasp  the  fact  that  he  was  a 
"  folk-poet,"  into  whom  the  soul  of  a  poet  of  all  time  and  all  space 
had  entered.  In  all  times  and  countries  where  folk-poetry  has  a 
genuine  existence,  its  forms  and  expressions  are  much  less  the 
property  of  the  individual  than  of  the  race.  The  business  of  collect- 
ing ballads  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  and  doubtful,  not  to  say 
dangerous,  open  to  the  amateur.  But  it  is  certain  that  any  collector 
who  was  not  a  mere  simpleton  would  at  once  reject  as  spurious 
a  version  which  he  heard  in  identically  the  same  terms  from  two 
different  subjects.  He  would  know  that  they  must  have  got  it 
from  a  printed  or  at  least  written  source.  Now  Burns  is,  if  not 
our  only  example,  our  only  example  of  the  very  first  quality,  of  the 
poet  who  takes  existing  work  and  hands  it  on  shaped  to  his  own 
fashion.  Not  that  he  was  not  perfectly  competent  to  do  without 
any  existing  canvas ;  while,  when  he  had  it,  he  treated  it  without 
the  very  slightest  punctilio.  Of  some  of  the  songs  which  he 
reshaped  into  masterpieces  for  Johnson  and  Thomson  he  took  no 
more  than  the  air  and  measure ;  of  others  only  the  refrain  or  the 
first  few  lines ;  of  others  again  stanzas  or  parts  of  stanzas.  But 
everywhere  he  has  stamped  the  version  with  something  of  his 
own — something  thenceforward  inseparable  from  it,  and  yet  char- 
acteristic of  him.  In  the  expression  of  the  triumph  and  despair 
of  love,  not  sicklied  over  with  any  thought  as  in  most  modern 
poets,  only  Catullus  and  Sappho  can  touch  Burns.  "  Green  grow 
the  Rashes,  O,"  "Yestreen  I  had  a  Pint  of  Wine,"  the  farewell  to 
Clarinda,  and  the  famous  deathbed  verses  to  Jessie  Lewars,  make 
any  advance  on  them  impossible  in  point  of  spontaneous  and  un- 
reflecting emotion  ;  while  a  thousand  others  (the  number  is  hardly 
rhetorical)  come  but  little  behind.  "  Willie  brew'd  a  Peck  o' 
Maut "  in  the  same  way  rides  sovereign  at  the  head  of  a  troop  of 
Bacchanalian  verses  ;  and  the  touches  of  rhetoric  and  convention 
in  "Scots  wha  hae  "  cannot  spoil,  can  hardly  even  injure  it.  To 
some  it  really  seems  that  the  much  praised  lines  ''To  Mary  in 
Heaven,''  and  others  where  the  mood  is  less  boisterous,  show 
Burns  at  less  advantage,  not  because  the  kind  is  inferior,  but 


I  BURNS  17 

because  he  was  less  at  home  in  it ;  but  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
praise  too  highly  the  equally  famous  "  Mouse,"  and  some  other 
things.  It  was  in  this  tremendous  force  of  natural  passion  and 
affection,  and  in  his  simple  observation  of  common  things,  that 
Burns'  great  lesson  for  his  age  and  country  lay.  None  even  of  the 
reformers  had  dared  to  be  passionate  as  yet.  In  Cowper  indeed 
there  was  no  passion  except  of  religious  despair,  in  Crabbe  none 
except  that  of  a  grim  contemplation  of  the  miseries  and  dis- 
appointments of  life,  while  although  there  was  plenty  of  passion 
in  Blake  it  had  all  conveyed  itself  into  the  channel  of  mystical 
dreaming.  It  is  a  little  pathetic,  and  more  than  a  little  curious, 
to  compare  "  The  Star  that  Shines  on  Anna's  Breast,"  the  one 
approach  to  passionate  expression  of  Cowper's  one  decided  love, 
with  any  one  of  a  hundred  outbursts  of  Burns,  sometimes  to  the 
very  same  name. 

The  other  division  of  the  Poems,  at  the  head  of  which  stand 
The  Jolly  Beggars,  Tarn  o1  Shanter,  and  The  Holy  Fair,  exhibit 
an  equal  power  of  vivid  feeling  and  expression  with  a  greater 
creative  and  observant  faculty,  and  were  almost  equally  important 
as  a  corrective  and  alterative  to  their  generation.  The  age  was 
not  ill  either  at  drama,  at  manners-painting,  or  at  satire ;  but  the 
special  kind  of  dramatic,  pictorial,  and  satiric  presentation  which 
Burns  manifested  was  quite  unfamiliar  to  it  and  in  direct  contra- 
diction to  its  habits  and  crotchets.  It  had  had  a  tendency  to  look 
only  at  upper  and  middle-class  life,  to  be  conventional  in  its  very 
indecorum,  to  be  ironic,  indirect,  parabolical.  It  admired  the 
Dutch  painters,  it  had  dabbled  in  the  occult,  it  was  Voltairian 
enough ;  but  it  had  never  dared  to  outvie  Teniers  and  Steen  as 
in  The  Jolly  Beggars,  to  blend  naturalism  and  diablerie  with  the 
Overwhelming  verve  of  Tain  d1  Shanter,  to  change  the  jejune  free- 
thinking  of  two  generations  into  an  outspoken  and  particular 
attack  on  personal  hypocrisy  in  religion  as  in  Holy  Willie's  Prayer 
and  The  Holy  Fair.  Even  to  Scotsmen,  we  may  suspect  (or  rather 
we  pretty  well  know,  from  the  way  in  which  Robertson  and  Blair, 
Hume  and  Mackenzie,  write),  this  burst  of  genial  racy  humour  from 

c 


i8  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 


the  terrcefilius  of  Kilmarnock  must  have  been  somewhat  startling; 
and  it  speaks  volumes  for  the  amiable  author  of  the  Man  oj 
Feeling  that,  in  the  very  periodical  where  he  was  wont  to  air 
his  mild  Addisonian  hobbies,  he  should  have  warmly  com- 
mended the  Ayrshire  ploughman. 

In  a  period  where  we  have  so  many  great  or  almost  great 
names  to  notice,  it  cannot  be  necessary  to  give  the  weakest 
writers  of  its  weakest  part  more  than  that  summary  mention  which 
is  at  once  necessary  and  sufficient  to  complete  the  picture  of  the 
literary  movement  of  the  time.  And  this  is  more  especially  the 
case  with  reference  to  the  minor  verse  of  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  The  earliest  work  of  the  really  great  men  who  re-created 
English  poetry,  though  in  some  cases  chronologically  in,  is  not  in 
the  least  of  it.  For  the  rest,  it  would  be  almost  enough  to  say  that 
William  Hayley,  the  preface  to  whose  Triumphs  of  Temper  is  dated 
January  1781,  and  therefore  synchronised  very  closely  with  the 
literary  appearance  of  Cowper,  Crabbe,  and  Blake,  was  one  of  the 
most  conspicuous,  and  remains  one  of  the  most  characteristic  of 
them.  Hayley's  personal  relations  with  the  first  and  last  of  these 
poets — relations  which  have  kept  and  will  keep  his  name  in  some 
measure  alive  long  after  the  natural  death  of  his  verse — were  in 
both  cases  conditioned  by  circumstances  in  a  rather  trying  way, 
but  were  not  otherwise  than  creditable  to  him.  His  verse  itself 
is  impossible  and  intolerable  to  any  but  the  student  of  literary 
history,  who  knows  that  all  things  are  possible,  and  finds  the  realis- 
ation of  all  in  its  measure  interesting  The  heights,  or  at  least 
the  average  levels,  of  Hayley  may  be  fairly  taken  from  the  following 
quotation  : — 

Her  lips  involuntary  catch  the  chime 

And  half  articulate  the  soothing  rhyme  ; 

Till  weary  thought  no  longer  watch  can  keep, 

But  sinks  reluctant  in  the  folds  of  sleep — 

of  which  it  ran  only  be  said  that  any  schoolboy  could  write  it  : 
his  nut  infrequent  depths  from  the  couplet: — 

Her  airy  guard  prepares  the  softest  clown 
Kroiu  Peace's  wing  to  line  the  nuptial  crow,-,. 


MINOR  POETS HAYLEY  19 


where  the  image  of  a  guardian  angel  holding  Peace  with  the 
firmness  of  an  Irish  housewife,  and  plucking  her  steadily  in  order 
to  line  a  nuptial  crown  (which  must  have  been  a  sort  of  sun- 
bonnet)  with  the  down  thereof,  will  probably  be  admitted  to  be 
not  easily  surpassable.  Of  Hayley's  companions  in  song,  I  have 
been  dispensed  by  my  predecessor  from  troubling  myself  with 
Erasmus  Darwin,  who  was  perhaps  intellectually  the  ablest  of 
them,  though  the  extreme  absurdity  of  the  scheme  of  his  Botanic 
Garden  brought  him,  as  the  representative  of  the  whole  school, 
under  the  lash  of  the  Anti-Jacobin  in  never-dying  lines.  Darwin's 
friend  arid  townswoman,  Anna  Seward ;  Mrs.  Barbauld,  the 
author  of  the  noble  lines,  "  Life,  we've  been  long  together  " — the 
nobility  of  which  is  rather  in  the  sentiment  than  in  the  expression — 
and  of  much  tame  and  unimportant  stuff;  Merry,  who  called 
himself  Delia  Crusca  and  gathered  round  him  the  school  of 
gosling  imitators  that  drew  on  itself  the  lash  of  Gifford ;  the 
Laureate  Pye ;  and  others  who,  less  fortunate  than  the  victims  of 
Canning  and  Frere,  have  suffered  a  second  death  in  the  forgetting 
of  the  very  satires  in  which  they  met  their  deserts,  can  be  barely 
named  now.  Two,  however,  may  claim,  if  no  great  performance,  a 
remarkable  influence  on  great  performers.  Dr.  Sayers,  a  member 
of  the  interesting  Norwich  school,  directly  affected  Southey,  and 
not  Southey  only,  by  his  unrhymed  verse ;  while  the  sonnets  of 
William  Lisle  Bowles,  now  only  to  be  read  with  a  mild  esteem  by 
the  friendliest  critic  most  conscious  of  the  historic  allowance, 
roused  Coleridge  to  the  wildest  enthusiasm  and  did  much  to 
form  his  poetic  taste.  To  Bowles,  and  perhaps  to  one  or  two 
others,  we  may  find  occasion  to  return  hereafter 

The  satires,  however,  which  have  been  more  than  once 
referred  to  in  the  preceding  paragraph,  form  a  most  important 
feature,  and  a  perhaps  almost  more  important  symptom,  of  the 
literary  state  of  the  time.  They  show,  indeed,  that  its  weakness 
did  not  escape  the  notice  of  contemporaries ;  but  they  also  show 
that  the  very  contemporaries  who  noticed  it  had  nothing  better  to 
give  in  the  way  of  poetry  proper  than  that  which  they  satirised. 


20  THE  END  OE  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 

In  fact,  one  of  the  chief  of  these  satirists,  Wolcot,  has  left  a 
considerable  mass  of  not  definitely  satirical  work  which  is  little 
if  at  all  better  than  the  productions  of  the  authors  he  lampooned. 

This  very  remarkable  body  of  satirical  verse,  which  extends 
from  the  Rolliad  and  the  early  satires  of  Peter  Pindar  at  the 
extreme  beginning  of  our  present  time  to  the  Pursuits  of  Litera- 
ture and  the  Anti-Jacobin  towards  its  close,  was  partly  literary  and 
partly  political,  diverging  indeed  into  other  subjects,  but  keeping 
chiefly  to  these  two  and  imermixing  them  rather  inextiicably. 
The  Pursuits  of  Literature,  though  mainly  devoted  to  the  subject 
of  its  title,  is  also  to  a  great  extent  political ;  the  Rolliad  and  the 
Probationary  Odes,  intensely  political,  were  also  to  no  small 
extent  literary.  The  chief  examples  were  among  the  most  popular 
literary  productions  of  the  time ;  and  though  few  of  them  except 
the  selected  Poetry  of  the  Anti-Jacobin  are  now  read,  almost  all 
the  major  productions  deserve  reading.  The  great  defect  of 
contemporary  satire — that  it  becomes  by  mere  lapse  of  time  unin- 
telligible— is  obviated  to  no  small  extent  here  by  the  crotchet 
(rather  fortunate,  though  sometimes  a  little  tedious)  which  these 
writers,  almost  without  exception,  had  for  elaborate  annotation. 
Of  the  chief  of  them,  already  indicated  more  than  once  by 
reference  or  allusion,  some  account  may  be  given. 

The  Rolliad  is  the  name  generally  given  for  shortness  to  a 
collection  of  political  satires  originating  in  the  great  Westminster 
election  of  1784,  when  Fox  was  the  Whig  candidate.  It 
derived  its  name  from  a  Devonshire  squire,  Mr.  Rolle,  who  was  a 
great  supporter  of  Pitt  ;  and,  with  the  Political  Eclogues,  the  mock 
Probationary  Odes  for  the  laureateship  (vacant  by  Whitehead's 
death),  and  the  Political  Miscellanies,  which  closed  the  series,  was 
directed  against  the  young  Prime  Minister  and  his  adherents  by  a 
knot  of  members  of  Brooks's  (Hub,  who  are  identified  rather  by 
tradition  and  assertion  than  by  positive  evidence.  Sheridan, 
Tierney,  IHirgoyne,  Lord  John  Townshend,  Burke's  brother 
Richard,  and  other  public  men  probably  or  certainly  contributed, 
as  did  Ellis— afterwards  to  figure  so  conspicuously  in  the  same  way 


THE  ROLLIAD PETER  PINDAR 


on  the  other  side.  But  the  chief  writers  were  a  certain  Dr.  Law- 
rence, a  great  friend  of  Burke,  who  was  in  a  way  the  editor ; 
Tickel,  a  descendant  of  Addison's  friend  and  a  connection  of  the 
Sheridans  ;  and  another  Irishman  named  Fitzpatrick.  The  various 
"  skits  "  of  which  the  book  or  series  is  composed  show  considerable 
literary  skill,  and  there  is  a  non-political  and  extraneous  interest 
in  the  fact  that  it  contains  some  rondeaux  believed  to  be  the  only, 
or  almost  the  only,  examples  of  that  form  written  in  England 
between  Cotton  in  the  seventeenth  century  and  the  revival  of  it 
not  very  many  years  ago.  The  fun  is  often  very  good  fun,  and 
there  is  a  lightness  and  brightness  about  the  verse  and  phrasing 
which  had  been  little  seen  in  English  since  Prior.  But  the  tone 
is  purely  personal ;  there  are  no  principles  at  stake,  and  the  book, 
besides  being  pretty  coarse  in  tone,  is  a  sort  of  object  lesson  in 
the  merely  intriguing  style  of  politics  which  had  become  character- 
istic of  England  under  the  great  seventy  years'  reign  of  the 
Whigs. 

Coarseness  and  personality,  however,  are  in  the  Rolliad  refined 
and  high-minded  in  comparison  with  the  work  of  "  Peter  Pindar," 
which  has  the  redeeming  merit  of  being  even  funnier,  with  the 
defect  of  being  much  more  voluminous  and  unequal.  John 
Wolcot  was  a  Devonshire  man,  born  in  May  1738  at  Kingsbridge, 
or  rather  its  suburb  Dodbrooke,  in  Devonshire.  He  was  educated 
as  a  physician,  and  after  practising  some  time  at  home  was  taken 
by  Sir  William  Trelawney  to  Jamaica.  Here  he  took  orders  and 
received  a  benefice ;  but  when  he  returned  to  England  after  Tre- 
lawney's  death  he  practically  unfrocked  himself  and  resumed  the 
cure  of  bodies.  Although  he  had  dabbled  both  in  letters  and  in 
art,  it  was  not  till  1782  that  he  made  any  name  ;  and  he  did  it 
then  by  the  rather  unexpected  way  of  writing  poetical  satires 
in  the  form  of  letters  to  the  members  of  the  infant  Royal 
Academy.  From  this  he  glided  into  satire  of  the  political  kind, 
which,  however,  though  he  was  a  strong  Whig  and  something 
more,  did  not  so  much  devote  itself  to  the  attack  or  support  oi 
either  of  the  great  parties  as  to  personal  lampoons  on  the  king, 


THE  KND  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CIIAI-. 


his  family,  and  his  friends.  Neither  Charles  the  Second  at  the 
hands  of  Marvel),  nor  George  the  Fourth  at  the  hands  of  Moore, 
received  anything  like  the  steady  fire  of  lampoon  which  VVolcot 
for  years  poured  upon  the  most  harmless  and  respectable  of 
English  monarchs.  George  the  Third  had  indeed  no  vices, — 
unless  a  certain  parsimony  may  be  dignified  by  that  name, — but 
he  had  many  foibles  of  the  kind  that  is  more  useful  to  the  satirist 
than  even  vice.  Wolcot's  extreme  coarseness,  his  triviality  of 
subject,  and  a  vulgarity  of  thought  which  is  quite  a  different 
thing  from  either,  are  undeniable.  But  The  Lousiad  (a  perfect 
triumph  of  cleverness  expended  on  what  the  Greeks  called  rhyparo- 
graphy),  the  famous  pieces  on  George  and  the  Apple  Dumplings 
and  on  the  King's  visit  to  Whitbread's  Brewery,  with  scores  of 
other  things  of  the  same  kind  (the  best  of  all,  perhaps,  being  the 
record  of  the  Devonshire  Progress),  exhibit  incredible  felicity  and 
fertility  in  the  lower  kinds  of  satire.  This  satire  Wolcot  could 
apply  with  remarkable  width  of  range.  His  artistic  satires  (and 
it  must  be  admitted  that  he  had  not  bad  taste  here)  have  been 
noticed.  He  riddled  the  new  devotion  to  physical  science  in 
the  unlucky  person  of  Sir  Joseph  Banks ;  the  chief  of  his  literary 
lampoons,  a  thing  which  is  quite  a  masterpiece  in  its  way,  is  his 
"Bozzy  and  Piozzi,"  wherein  Boswell  and  Mrs.  Thrale  are  made 
to  string  in  amocbean  fashion  the  most  absurd  or  the  most 
laughable  of  their  respective  reminiscences  of  Johnson  into  verses 
which,  for  lightness  and  liveliness  of  burlesque  representation, 
have  hardly  a  superior.  Until  the  severe  legislation  which  followed 
the  Jacobin  terror  in  France  cowed  him,  and  to  some  extent  even 
subsequently,  Wolcot  maintained  a  sort  of  Ishmaelite  attitude,  by 
turns  attacking  and  defending  himself  against  men  of  eminence  in 
literature  and  politics,  after  a  fashion  the  savagery  whereof  was 
excused  sometimes  by  its  courage  and  nearly  always  by  an  exu- 
berant good-humour  which  both  here  and  elsewhere  accompanies 
very  distinct  ill -nature.  His  literary  life  in  London  covered 
about  a  quarter  of  a  century,  after  which,  losing  his  sight,  he 
retired  once  more  to  the  West,  though  he  is  said  to  have  died  at 


THE  ANTI-JACOBIN  23 


Somers  Town  in  1819.  The  best  edition  of  his  works  is  in  five 
good-sized  volumes,  but  it  is  known  not  to  be  complete. 

Both  the  Rolliad  men  and  Wolcot  had  been  on  the  Whig, 
Wolcot  almost  on  the  Republican  side ;  and  for  some  years  they 
had  met  with  no  sufficient  adversaries,  though  Gifford  soon  engaged 
"  Peter "  on  fairly  equal  terms.  The  great  revulsion  of  feeling, 
however,  which  the  acts  of  the  French  Revolution  induced  among 
Englishmen  generally  drew  on  a  signal  rally  on  the  Tory  part. 
The  Anti-Jacobin  newspaper,  with  Gifford  as  its  editor,  and 
Canning,  Ellis  (now  a  convert),  and  Frere  as  its  chief  contributors, 
not  merely  had  at  its  back  the  national  sentiment  and  the  official 
power,  but  far  outstripped  in  literary  vigour  and  brilliancy  the 
achievements  of  the  other  side.  The  famous  collection  above 
referred  to,  The  Poetry  of  the  Anti-Jacobin,  which  has  been  again 
and  again  reprinted,  shows  no  signs  of  losing  its  attraction, — a 
thing  almost  unparalleled  in  the  case  of  satirical  work  nearly  a 
century  old.  Its  very  familiarity  makes  it  unnecessary  to  dwell 
much  on  it,  but  it  is  safe  to  say  that  nothing  of  the  kind  more 
brilliant  has  ever  been  written,  or  is  very  likely  ever  to  be  written, 
than  the  parodies  of  Southey's  Sapphics  and  "Henry  Martin" 
sonnet,  the  litany  of  the  Jacobins,  French  and  English,  the 
"skits"  on  Payne  Knight  and  Darwin,  The  Rovers,  —  mocking 
the  new  German  sentimentalism  and  medievalism, — and  the 
stately  satire  of  "The  New  Morality," — where,  almost  alone,  the 
writers  become  serious,  and  reach  a  height  not  attained  since 
Dryden. 

Gifford  and  Mathias  differ  from  the  others  just  mentioned  in 
being  less  directly  political  in  writing  and  inspiration,  though 
Gifford  at  least  was  a  strong  politician.  He  was,  like  Wolcot,  a 
Devonshire  man,  born  at  Ashburton  in  1757,  and,  as  his  numerous 
enemies  and  victims  took  care  often  to  remind  him,  of  extremely 
humble  birth  and  early  breeding,  having  been  a  shoemaker's 
apprentice.  Attracting  attention  as  a  clever  boy,  he  was  sent  to 
Exeter  College  and  soon  attained  to  influential  patronage.  To  do 
him  justice,  however,  he  made  his  reputation  by  the  work  of  his 


24  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP. 

own  hand, — his  satires  of  The  Baviad,  1794,  and  The  Mceviad 
next  year,  attacking  and  pretty  nearly  extinguishing  Merry  and  his 
Delia  Cruscans,  a  set  of  minor  bards  and  mutual  admirers  who 
had  infested  the  magazines  and  the  libraries  for  some  years.1  The 
Anti-Jacobin  and  the  editing  of  divers  English  classics  put  Gifford 
still  higher ;  and  when  the  Quarterly  Review  was  established  in 
opposition  to  the  Edinburgh,  his  appointment  (1809)  to  the 
editorship,  which  he  held  almost  till  his  death  (he  gave  it  up  in 
1824  and  died  in  1826),  completed  his  literary  position.  Gifford 
is  little  read  nowadays,  and  a  name  which  was  not  a  very  popular 
one  even  on  his  own  side  during  his  lifetime  has,  since  the  triumph 
of  the  politics  and  of  some  of  the  literary  styles  which  he  opposed, 
become  almost  a  byword  for  savage  and  unfair  criticism.  The 
penalty  of  unfairness  is  usually  and  rightly  paid  in  kind,  and 
Gifford  has  paid  it  very  amply.  The  struggles  of  his  youth  and 
lifelong  ill-health  no  doubt  aggravated  a  disposition  at  no  time 
very  sweet ;  and  the  feuds  of  the  day,  both  literary  and  political, 
were  apt  to  be  waged,  even  by  men  far  superior  to  Gifford  in  early 
and  natural  advantages,  with  the  extremest  asperity  and  without 
too  much  scruple.  But  Gifford  is  perhaps  our  capital  example  in 
English  of  a  cast  of  mind  which  is  popularly  identified  with  that 
of  the  critic,  though  in  truth  nothing  is  more  fatal  to  the  attain- 
ment of  the  highest  critical  competence.  It  was  apparently  im- 
possible for  him  (as  it  has  been,  and,  it  would  seem,  is  for  others) 
to  regard  the  author  whom  he  was  criticising,  the  editor  who  had 
preceded  him  in  his  labours,  or  the  adversary  with  whom  he  was 
carrying  on  a  polemic,  as  anything  but  a  being  partly  idiotic  and 
partly  villainous,  who  must  be  soundly  scolded,  first  for  having 

1  Although  The  Baviad  and  The  Miii'iad  are  well  worth  reading,  it  may  he 
questioned  whether  they  are  as  amusing  as  their  chief  quarry,  The  British  Album, 
"containing  the  poems  of  Delia  Crusca,  Anna  Matilda,  Benedict,  Cesario,  The 
Bard,  etc.,"  the  two  little  volumes  of  which  attained  their  third  edition  in  1790. 
"Delia  Crusca,"  or  Robert  Merry  (1755-98),  was  a  gentleman  by  birth,  and  of 
means,  with  a  Harrow  and  Cambridge  training,  and  some  service  in  the  army. 
Strange  to  say,  there  is  testimony  of  guod  wits  that  he  was  by  no  means  a  fool  ; 
yet  such  drivelling  rubbish  as  he  and  his  coadjutors  wrote  even  the  present  day 
lias  hardly  seen. 


1  GIFFORD MATHIAS  25 

done  what  he  did,  and  secondly  to  prevent  him  from  doing  it 
again.  So  ingrained  was  this  habit  in  Gifford  that  he  could 
refrain  from  indulging  it,  neither  in  editing  the  essays  of  his  most 
distinguished  contributors,  nor  in  commenting  on  the  work  of  these 
contributors  outside  the  periodicals  which  he  directed.  Yet  he 
was  a  really  useful  influence  in  more  ways  than  one.  The  service 
that  he  did  in  forcibly  suppressing  the  Delia  Cruscan  nuisance  is 
even  yet  admitted,  and  there  has  been  plentiful  occasion,  not 
always  taken,  for  similar  literary  dragonnades  since.  And  his  work 
as  an  editor  of  English  classics  was,  blemishes  of  manner  and 
temper  excepted,  in  the  main  very  good  work. 

Thomas  James  Mathias,  the  author  of  The  Pursuits  of 
Literature,  was  a  much  nearer  approach  to  the  pedant  pure  and 
simple.  For  he  did  not,  like  Gifford,  redeem  his  rather  indiscrimi- 
nate attacks  on  contemporaries  by  a  sincere  and  intelligent  devo- 
tion to  older  work  ;  and  he  was,  much  more  than  Gifford,  ostenta- 
tious of  such  learning  as  he  possessed.  Accordingly  the  immense 
popularity  of  his  only  book  of  moment  is  a  most  remarkable  sign 
of  the  times.  De  Quincey,  who  had  seen  its  rise  and  its  fall, 
declares  that  for  a  certain  time,  and  not  a  very  short  one,  at  the 
end  of  the  last  century  and  the  beginning  of  this,  The  Pursuits  of 
Literature  was  the  most  popular  book  of  its  own  day,  and  as 
popular  as  any  which  had  appeared  since ;  and  that  there  is  not 
very  much  hyperbole  in  this  is  proved  by  its  numerous  editions, 
and  by  the  constant  references  to  it  in  the  books  of  the  time. 
Colman,  who  was  one  of  Mathias's  victims,  declared  that  the  verse 
was  a  "peg  to  hang  the  notes  on";  and  the  habit  above  referred 
to  certainly  justified  the  gibe  to  no  small  extent.  If  the  book  is 
rather  hard  reading  nowadays  (and  it  is  certainly  rather  difficult 
to  recognise  in  it  even  the  "  demon  of  originality "  which  De 
Quincey  himself  grants  rather  grudgingly  as  an  offset  to  its  defects 
of  taste  and  scholarship),  it  is  perhaps  chiefly  obscured  by  the 
extreme  desultoriness  of  the  author's  attacks  and  the  absence  of 
any  consistent  and  persistent  target.  Much  that  Mathias  repre- 
hends in  Godwin  and  Priestley,  in  Colman  and  Wolcot,  and  a 


26  THE  END  OF  TIIK  KIGHTKKNTII  CENTURY         CHAP. 


whole  crowd  of  lesser  men,  is  justifiably  censured ;  much  that  he 
lays  down  is  sound  and  good  enough.  But  the  whole — which, 
after  the  wont  of  the  time,  consists  of  several  pieces  jointed  on  to 
each  other  and  all  flooded  with  notes — suffers  from  the  twin  vices 
of  negation  and  divagation.  Indeed,  its  chief  value  is  that,  both 
by  its  composition  and  its  reception,  it  shows  the  general  sense 
that  literature  was  not  in  a  healthy  state,  and  that  some  renais- 
sance, some  reaction,  was  necessary. 

The  prominence  of  the  French  Revolution,  which  has  already 
appeared  more  than  once  in  the  above  account  of  late  eighteenth 
century  poetry,  is  still  more  strongly  reflected  in  the  prose 
writing  of  the  period.  Indeed,  many  of  its  principal  writers 
devoted  their  chief  attention  either  to  describing,  to  attacking,  or 
to  defending  the  events  and  principles  of  this  portentous  phenom- 
enon. The  chief  of  them  were  John  Moore,  Arthur  Young,  Helen 
Maria  Williams,  Thomas  Paine,  William  Godwin,  Richard  Price, 
Mary  Wollstonecraft,  and  Thomas  Holcroft.  Of  these  Price,  a 
veteran  who  had  nearly  reached  his  sixtieth  year  when  our  period 
commences,  chiefly  belongs  to  literature  as  roughly  handled  by 
Burke,  as  does  Priestley,  whose  writing  was  very  extensive,  but 
who  was  as  much  more  a  "natural  philosopher"  than  a  man  of 
letters  as  Price  was  much  less  a  man  of  letters  than  a  moralist  and 
a  statistician.  Both,  moreover,  have  been  mentioned  in  the  pre- 
ceding volume,  and  it  is  not  necessary  to  say  much  about  them, 
or  about  John  Home  Tooke  (1736-1812), philologist  and  firebrand. 

Of  the  others  something  may,  and  in  some  cases  not  a  little 
must,  appear.  Dr.  John  Moore,  sometimes  called  "  Zeluco " 
Moore  (from  his  most  popular  book),  and  father  of  the  general 
who  fell  at  Corunna,  was  born  at  Stirling  in  the  winter  of  1729-30. 
Studying  medicine  at  Glasgow,  he  was  apprenticed  (as  Smollett 
had  been  earlier)  to  Dr.  John  Gordon,  and  entered  the  army  as 
surgeon's  mate  for  the  Laufeldt  campaign.  He  then  lived  two 
years  in  Paris,  perfecting  himself  in  medicine,  after  which  he 
established  himself  in  Glasgow.  After  many  years'  practice  there, 
he  accompanied  the  young  Duke  of  Hamilton  on  various  travels 


JOHN   MOORE  27 


through  Europe,  and  in  1778  settled  in  London.  This  was  his 
headquarters  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  till  his  death  at  Richmond  on 
2ist  January  1803.  The  chief  interruption  to  his  residence  there 
was  his  memorable  journey  with  Lord  Lauderdale  to  Paris  in  the 
latter  half  of  1792,  which  resulted  in  one  of  the  most  vivid  and 
trustworthy  accounts  by  an  eyewitness  of  the  opening  scenes  of 
the  Terror.  This  Journal  during  a  Residence  in  France  was  pub- 
lished during  the  next  two  years.  But  Moore  had  earlier  than 
this,  though  not  very  early  in  his  own  life,  become  an  author. 
His  View  of  Society  and  Manners  in  France,  Switzerland,  and 
Germany,  the  result  of  his  journeyings  with  the  Duke,  appeared  in 
1779,  w'th  a  continuation  relating  to  Italy  two  years  later;  and  in 
1786  he  published  his  one  famous  novel  Zehico.  After  the 
Journal  he  returned  to  novel  writing  in  Edward  (1796)  and 
Mordaunt  (1800) — books  by  no  means  contemptible,  but  suffering 
from  the  want  of  a  central  interest  and  of  a  more  universal  grasp 
of  character  and  manners.  He  contributed  a  Life  of  Smollett 
and  an  Essay  on  Romance  to  an  edition  of  his  friend's  works  in 
1797.  One  or  two  medical  books  also  stand  to  his  credit,  while 
he  had  rather  unadvisedly  added  to  his  admirable  Journal  a  View 
of  the  Causes  of  the  French  Revolution  which  is  not  worthy  of  it. 
His  complete  works  fill  seven  volumes. 

Of  these,  the  earlier  travels  are  readable  enough,  and  some- 
times very  noteworthy  in  matter.  It  is  almost  enough  to  say  that 
they  contain  some  of  the  latest  accounts  by  an  Englishman  of 
France  while  it  was  still  merry,  and  of  Venice  while  it  was  still 
independent ;  an  early  picture  of  Alpine  travel ;  very  interesting 
personal  sketches  of  Voltaire  and  Frederick  the  Great ;  and  one 
memorable  passage  (remembered  and  borrowed  by  Scott  in  Red- 
gauntlet}  telling  how  at  Florence  the  shadow  of  Prince  Charlie, 
passing  the  Duke  of  Hamilton  in  the  public  walks,  fixed  his 
eyes  earnestly  on  the  Duke,  as  though  saying,  "  Our  ancestors 
were  better  acquainted."  Zeluco  and  the  Journal  alone  deserve 
much  attention  from  any  one  but  a  professed  student  of  literature. 
The  value  of  the  latter  has  been  admitted  by  all  competent 


28  THK  END  OF  TI1K  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 

authorities,  and  it  is  enhanced  by  the  fact  that  Moore  was  a 
strong  Whig,  and  was  even  accused  by  some  zealots  of  favouring 
Jacobinism.  His  picture,  therefore,  of  the  way  in  which  political 
revolution  glides  into  ethical  anarchy  is  certainly  unbiassed  the 
other  way.  Of  Zeluco  everybody,  without  perhaps  a  very  clear 
knowledge  of  its  authorship,  knows  one  passage — the  extremely 
humorous  letter  containing  the  John  Bull  contempt  of  the  sailor 
Dawson  for  the  foolish  nation  which  clothes  its  troops  in  "  white, 
which  is  absurd,  and  blue,  which  is  only  fit  for  the  artillery  and 
the  blue  horse."  But  few  know  much  more,  though  there  is  close 
by  a  much  more  elaborate  and  equally  good  piece  of  Smollettian 
fun  in  the  quarrel  of  Buchanan  and  Targe,  the  Scotch  Whig  and 
Jacobite,  over  the  reputation  of  Queen  Mary.  The  book,  how- 
ever, besides  the  unlucky  drawback  that  almost  all  its  interest 
lies  in  the  latter  part,  has  for  hero  a  sort  of  lifeless  monster  of 
wickedness,  who  is  quite  as  uninteresting  as  a  faultless  one,  and 
shows  little  veracity  of  character  except  in  the  minor  personages 
and  episodes.  In  these,  and  indeed  throughout  Moore's  work, 
there  is  a  curious  mixture  of  convention  with  extreme  shrewdness, 
of  somewhat  commonplace  expression  with  a  remarkably  pregnant 
and  humorous  conception.  But  he  lacks  concentration  and  finish, 
and  is  therefore  never  likely  to  be  much  read  again  as  a  whole. 

There  may  appear  to  be  some  slight  inconsistency  in  giving  a 
paragraph,  if  only  a  short  one,  to  Arthur  Young  where  distinct 
mention  has  been  refused  to  Price  and  Priestley.  But  Olivier  de 
Serres  has  secured  a  place  in  all  histories  of  French  literature  as 
a  representative  of  agricultural  writing,  and  Young  is  our  F.nglish 
Serres.  Moreover,  his  Surrey  of  France  has  permanent  attraction 
for  its  picture  of  the  state  of  that  country  just  before,  and  in  the 
earliest  days  of,  the  Revolution.  And  though  his  writing  is 
extremely  incorrect  and  unequal,  though  its  literary  effect  is 
much  injured  by  the  insertion  of  statistical  details  which  some- 
times turn  it  for  pages  together  into  a  mere  set  of  tables,  he  has 
constant  racy  phrases,  some  of  which  have  passed  into  the  most 
honourable  state  of  all — that  of  unidentified  quotation — while  more 


HELEN  MARIA  WILLIAMS  29 


deserve  it.  He  was  born  in  1741,  the  son  of  a  Suffolk  clergy- 
man, was  connected  by  marriage  with  the  Burneys,  and  very 
early  developed  the  passion  for  agricultural  theory  and  practice 
which  marked  his  whole  life,  even  when  in  his  later  years  (he 
lived  till  1820)  he  fell  under  the  influence  of  religious  crotchets. 
His  French  travels  were  published  in  1792-94,  and  form  by  far  his 
most  attractive  book,  though  his  surveys  of  England  and  Ireland 
contain  much  that  is  good.  Young  was  a  keen,  though  not  a 
very  consistent  or  clear-sighted  politician,  especially  on  the  side  of 
political  economy.  But,  like  other  men  of  his  time,  he  soon  fell 
away  from  his  first  love  for  the  French  Revolution.  In  the 
literary,  historical,  and  antiquarian  associations  of  the  places  he 
visited,  he  seems  to  have  felt  no  interest  whatever. 

Helen  Maria  Williams,  with  Young  and  Moore,  is  our  chief 
English  witness  for  the  state  of  France  and  Paris  just  before  and 
during  the  early  years  of  the  Revolution.  She  was  one  of 
Johnson's  girl  pets  in  his  latest  years,  but  Boswell  is  certainly 
justified  in  suggesting  that  if  the  sage  had  lived  a  little  longer  he 
would  by  no  means  have  repeated  his  elegant  compliment :  "  If 
I  am  so  ill  when  you  are  near,  what  should  I  be  when  you  are 
away  ? "  She  outlived  this  phase  also  of  her  life,  and  did  not 
die  till.  1828,  being  then  sixty-five.  Even  in  the  early  days  she 
had  been  a  Girondist,  not  a  Jacobin ;  but  she  happened  to  live  in 
Paris  during  the  outbreak  of  the  Revolution,  wrote  Letters  from 
France,  which  had  a  great  popularity,  and  was  hand  in  glove  with 
most  of  the  English  and  Irish  revolutionary  leaders.  Wolfe 
Tone  in  his  diary  speaks  of  her  as  "  Miss  Jane  Bull  completely," 
but  neither  prudery  nor  patriotism  would  have  struck  persons  less 
prejudiced  than  the  leader  of  the  United  Irishmen  as  the  leading 
points  of  Helen  Maria.  Her  poems,  published  in  1786,  during 
her  pre-revolutionary  days,  are  dedicated  to  Queen  Charlotte,  and 
nearly  half  the  first  of  the  two  pretty  little  volumes  (which  have  a 
horrific  frontispiece  of  the  Princes  in  the  Tower,  by  Maria 
Cosway)  is  occupied  by  a  stately  list  of  subscribers,  with  the 
Prince  of  Wales  at  their  head.  They  have  little  merit,  but  are 


30  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP 


not  uninteresting  for  their  "  signs  of  the  times  "  :  sonnets,  a  tale 
called  Edwin  and  Eltruda,  an  address  to  Sensibility,  and  so  forth. 
But  the  longest,  Peru,  is  in  the  full  eighteenth  century  couplet 
with  no  sign  of  innovation.  The  Letters  from  France,  which 
extend  to  eight  volumes,  possess,  besides  the  interest  of  their 
subject,  the  advantage  of  a  more  than  fair  proficiency  on  the 
author's  part  in  the  formal  but  not  ungraceful  prose  of  her  time, 
neither  unduly  Johnsonian  nor  in  any  way  slipshod.  But  it  may 
perhaps  be  conceded  that,  but  for  the  interest  of  the  subject,  they 
would  not  be  of  much  importance. 

The  most  distinguished  members  of  the  Jacobin  school,  from 
the  literary  point  of  view,  were  Thomas  Paine  and  William 
Godwin.  Paine  was  only  a  literary  man  by  accident.  He  was 
born  at  Thetford  on  2pth  January  1737,  in  the  rank  of  small  trades- 
man, and  subsequently  became  a  custom-house  officer.  But  he 
lost  his  place  for  debt  and  dubious  conduct  in  1774,  and  found 
a  more  congenial  home  in  America,  where  he  defended  the 
rebellion  of  the  Colonies  in  a  pamphlet  entitled  Common  Sense. 
His  new  compatriots  rewarded  him  pretty  handsomely,  and  after 
about  a  dozen  years  he  returned  to  Europe,  visiting  England, 
which,  however,  he  left  again  very  shortly  (it  is  said  owing  to 
the  persuasion  of  Blake),  just  in  time  to  escape  arrest.  He  had 
already  made  friends  in  France,  and  his  publication  of  Th( 
Rig/its  of  Man  (1791-92),  in  answer  to  Burke's  attack  on  the 
Revolution,  made  him  enormously  popular  in  that  country.  He 
was  made  a  French  citizen,  and  elected  by  the  Pas  de  Calais  to 
the  Convention.  His  part  here  was  not  discreditable.  He 
opposed  the  King's  execution,  and,  being  expelled  the  Convention 
and  imprisoned  by  the  Jacobins,  wrote  his  other  notorious  work, 
The  Age  of  Reason  (1794-95),  in  which  he  maintained  the  Deist 
position  against  both  Atheism  and  Christianity.  He  recovered 
his  liberty  and  his  seat,  and  was  rather  a  favourite  with  Napoleon. 
In  1802  he  went  back  to  America,  and  died  there  (a  confirmed 
drunkard  it  is  said  and  denied)  seven  years  later.  A  few 
years  later  still,  Cobbett,  in  one  of  his  sillier  moods,  brought 


I  PAINE  31 

Paine's  bones  back  to  England,  which  did  not  in  the  least  want 
them. 

The  coarse  and  violent  expression,  as  well  as  the  unpopular 
matter,  of  Paine's  works  may  have  led  to  his  being  rather  unfairly 
treated  in  the  hot  fights  of  the  Revolutionary  period ;  but  the 
attempts  which  have  recently  been  made  to  whitewash  him  are  a 
mere  mistake  of  reaction,  or  paradox,  or  pure  stupidity.  The 
charges  which  used  to  be  brought  against  his  moral  character 
matter  little ;  for  neither  side  in  these  days  had,  or  in  any  days 
has,  a  monopoly  of  loose  or  of  holy  living.  But  two  facts  will 
always  remain:  first,  that  Paine  attacked  subjects  which  all  require 
calm,  and  some  of  them  reverent,  treatment,  in  a  tone  of  the 
coarsest  violence  ;  and,  secondly,  that  he  engaged  in  questions  of 
the  widest  reach,  and  requiring  endless  thought  and  reading,  with 
the  scanty  equipments  and  the  superabundant  confidence  of  a 
self-educated  man.  No  better  instance  of  this  latter  characteristic 
could  be  produced  or  required  than  a  sentence  in  the  preface 
to  the  second  part  of  the  Age  of  Reason,  Here  Paine  (who 
admitted  that  he  had  written  the  first  part  hastily,  in  expectation  of 
imprisonment,  without  a  library,  and  without  so  much  as  a  copy 
of  the  Scriptures  he  was  attacking  at  hand,  and  who  further  con- 
fessed that  he  knew  neither  Hebrew  nor  Greek  nor  even  Latin) 
observes  :  "  I  have  produced  a  work  that  no  Bible-believer,  though 
writing  at  his  ease  and  with  a  library  of  Church  books  about  him, 
can  refute."  In  this  charming  self-satisfaction,  which  only  natural 
temper  assisted  by  sufficient  ignorance  can  attain  in  perfection, 
Paine  strongly  resembles  his  disciple  Cobbett.  But  the  two  were 
also  alike  in  the  effect  which  this  undoubting  dogmatism,  joined 
to  a  very  clear,  simple,  and  forcible  style,  less  correct  in  Paine's 
case  than  in  Cobbett's,  produced  upon  readers  even  more  ignorant 
than  themselves,  and  greatly  their  inferiors  in  mental  strength  and 
literary  skill.  Paine,  indeed,  was  as  much  superior  to  Cobbett  in 
logical  faculty  as  he  was  his  inferior  in  range  of  attainments  and 
charm  of  style ;  while  his  ignorance  and  his  arbitrary  assumption 
and  exclusion  of  premisses  passed  unnoticed  by  the  classes  whom 


32  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 

he  more  particularly  addressed.  He  was  thus  among  the  lower 
and  lower  middle  classes  by  far  the  most  formidable  propagator 
of  anarchist  ideas  in  religion  and  politics  that  England  produced  ; 
and  his  influence  lasted  till  far  into  the  present  century,  being,  it 
is  said,  only  superseded  by  new  forms  of  a  similar  spirit.  But  he 
never  could  have  had  much  on  persons  of  education,  unless  they 
were  prepared  to  sympathise  with  him,  or  were  of  singularly  weak 
mind. 

William  Godwin,  on  the  other  hand,  affected  the  "  educated 
persons,"  and  those  of  more  or  less  intellectual  power,  even  more 
forcibly  than  Paine  affected  the  vulgar.  This  influence  of  his, 
indeed,  is  a  thing  almost  unique,  and  it  has  perhaps  never  yet 
been  succinctly  examined  and  appraised.  Born  at  Wisbech  in 
1756,  the  son  of  a  dissenting  minister,  he  himself  was  thoroughly 
educated  for  the  Presbyterian  ministry,  and  for  some  five  years 
discharged  its  functions.  Then  in  1783  (again  the  critical  period) 
he  became  unorthodox  in  theology,  and  took  to  literature,  addict- 
ing himself  to  Whig  politics.  He  also  did  a  certain  amount  of 
tutoring.  It  was  not,  however,  till  nearly  ten  years  after  he  had 
first  taken  to  writing  that  he  made  his  mark,  and  attained  the 
influence  above  referred  to  by  a  series  of  works  rather  remarkably 
different  in  character.  1793  saw  the  famous  Inquiry  concerning 
Political  Justice,  which  for  a  time  carried  away  many  of  the  best 
and  brightest  of  the  youth  of  England.  Next  year  came  the 
equally  famous  and  more  long-lived  novel  of  Caleb  Williams,  and 
an  extensive  criticism  (now  much  forgotten,  but  at  the  time  of 
almost  equal  importance  with  these),  published  in  the  Morning 
Chronicle,  of  the  charge  of  Lord  Chief-Justice  Eyre  in  the  trial  of 
Home  Tooke,  Holcroft,  and  others  for  high  treason.  Godwin 
himself  ran  some  risk  of  prosecution ;  and  that  he  was  left  un- 
molested shows  that  the  Pitt  government  did  not  strain  its  powers, 
as  is  sometimes  alleged.  In  1797  he  published  The  Enquirer,  a 
collection  of  essays  on  many  different  subjects;  and  in  1799  his 
second  remarkable  novel  (it  should  be  said  that  in  his  early  years 
of  struggle  he  had  written  others  which  are  quite  forgotten) 


GODWIN  33 


St.  Leon.  The  closing  years  of  the  period  also  saw  first  his 
connection  and  then  his  marriage  with  Mary  Wollstonecraft,  who 
will  be  noticed  immediately  after  him. 

It  is  rather  curious  that  Godwin,  who  was  but  forty-four  at  the 
beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  continued  to  be  a  diligent 
writer  as  well  as  a  publisher  and  bookseller  till  his  death  in  1836, 
his  last  years  being  made  comfortable  by  a  place  under  the 
Reform  Ministry,  never  did  anything  really  good  after  the 
eighteenth  century  had  closed.  His  tragedy  Antonio  only  deserves 
remembrance  because  of  Lamb's  exquisite  account  of  its  damna- 
tion. His  Life  of  Chaucer  (1801)  was  one  of  the  earliest  examples 
of  that  style  of  padding  and  guesswork  in  literary  biography 
with  which  literature  has  been  flooded  since.  His  later  novels 
— Fleetwood,  Mandeville,  Cloudesley,  etc. — are  far  inferior  to  Caleb 
Williams  (1794)  and  St.  Leon  (1799).  His  Treatise  of  Population 
(1820),  in  answer  to  Malthus,  was  belated  and  ineffective;  and 
his  History  of  the  Commonwealth,  in  four  volumes,  though  a  very 
respectable  compilation,  is  nothing  more.  Godwin's  character  was 
peculiar,  and  cannot  be  said  to  be  pleasing.  Though  regarded 
(or  at  least  described)  by  his  enemies  as  an  apostle  of  license,  he 
seems  to  have  been  a  rather  cold-blooded  person,  whose  one 
passion  for  Mary  Wollstonecraft  was  at  least  as  much  an  affair  of 
the  head  as  of  the  heart.  He  was  decidedly  vain,  and  as 
decidedly  priggish ;  but  the  worst  thing  about  him  was  his 
tendency  to  "  sponge  " — a  tendency  which  he  indulged  not  merely 
on  his  generous  son-in-law  Shelley,  but  on  almost  everybody  with 
whom  he  came  in  contact.  It  is,  however,  fair  to  admit  that 
this  tendency  (which  was  probably  a  legacy  of  the  patronage 
system)  was  very  wide-spread  at  the  time ;  that  the  mighty  genius 
of  Coleridge  succumbed  to  it  to  a  worse  extent  even  than  Godwin 
did ;  and  that  Southey  himself,  who  for  general  uprightness  and 
independence  has  no  superior  in  literary  history,  was  content  for 
years  to  live  upon  the  liberality  not  merely  of  an  uncle,  but  of  a 
school  comrade,  in  a  way  which  in  our  own  days  would  probably 
make  men  of  not  half  his  moral  worth  seriously  uncomfortable. 

D 


34  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH   CENTURY         CHAP 


Estimates  of  the  strictly  formal  excellence  of  Godwin's  writing 
have  differed  rather  remarkably.  To  take  two  only,  his  most 
recent  biographer,  Mr.  Kegan  Paul,  is  never  weary  of  praising  the 
"  beauty  "  of  Godwin's  style ;  while  Scott,  a  very  competent  and 
certainly  not  a  very  savage  critic,  speaks  of  the  style  of  the 
Chaucer  as  "uncommonly  depraved,  exhibiting  the  opposite 
defects  of  meanness  and  of  bombast.''  This  last  is  too  severe  ;  but 
I  am  unable  often  to  seethe  great  beauty,  the  charm,  and  so  forth, 
which  Godwin's  admirers  have  found  in  his  writings.  He  shows 
perhaps  at  his  best  in  this  respect  in  St.  Leon,  where  there  are 
some  passages  of  a  rather  artificial,  but  solemn  and  grandiose 
beauty ;  and  he  can  seldom  be  refused  the  praise  of  a  capable  and 
easily  wielded  fashion  of  writing,  equally  adapted  to  exposition, 
description,  and  argument.  But  that  Godwin's  taste  and  style  were 
by  no  means  impeccable  is  proved  by  his  elaborate  essay  on  the 
subject  in  the  Enquirer,  where  he  endeavours  to  show  that  the 
progress  of  English  prose-writing  had  been  one  of  unbroken  im- 
provement since  the  time  of  Queen  Elizabeth,  and  pours  contempt 
on  passages  of  Shakespeare  and  others  where  more  catholic 
appreciation  could  not  fail  to  see  the  beauty.  In  practice  his 
special  characteristic,  which  Scott  (or  Jeffrey,  for  the  criticism 
appeared  in  the  Edinburgh}  selected  for  special  reprobation  in  the 
context  of  the  passage  quoted  above,  was  the  accumulation  of 
short  sentences,  very  much  in  the  manner  of  which,  in  the  two 
generations  since  his  death,  Macaulay  and  the  late  Mr.  J.  R. 
Green  have  been  the  chief  exponents.  Hazlitt  probably  learnt 
this  from  Godwin  ;  and  I  think  there  is  no  doubt  that  Macaulay 
learnt  it  from  Hazlitt. 

It  may,  however,  be  freely  admitted  that  whatever  Godwin  nad 
to  say  was  at  least  likely  not  to  be  prejudicially  affected  by  the 
manner  in  which  he  said  it.  And  he  had,  as  we  have  seen,  a  great 
deal  to  say  in  a  great  many  kinds.  The  "  New  Philosophy,'  as  it 
was  called,  of  the  Political  Justice,  was  to  a  great  extent  softened,  if 
not  positively  retracted,  in  subsequent  editions  and  publications  : 
but  its  quality  as  first  set  forth  accounts  both  for  the  conquest 


GODWIN  35 


which  it,  temporarily  at  least,  obtained  over  such  minds  as  those  of 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  and  for  the  horror  with  which  it  was 
regarded  elsewhere.  Godwin's  system  was  not  too  consistent,  and 
many  of  its  parts  were  borrowed  more  or  less  directly  from  others  : 
from  Locke,  from  Hume,  from  the  French  materialists,  from 
Jonathan  Edwards,  and,  by  way  of  reaction  as  well  as  imitation, 
from  Rousseau.  But  Godwin's  distinctive  claim,  if  not  exactly 
glory,  is  that  he  was  the  first  systematic  Anarchist.  His  cardinal 
principle  was  that  government  in  itself,  and  with  all  its  conse- 
quences of  law,  restriction,  punishment,  etc.,  is  bad,  and  to  be  got 
rid  of.  He  combined  this  (logically  enough)  with  perfectibilism — 
supposing  the  individual  to  be  infinitely  susceptible  of  "  meliora- 
tion "  by  the  right  use  of  reason— and  (rather  illogically)  with 
necessarianism.  In  carrying  out  his  views  he  not  only  did  not 
hesitate  at  condemning  religion,  marriage,  and  all  other  restrictions 
of  the  kind,  but  indulged  in  many  curious  crotchets  as  to  the 
uselessness,  if  not  mischievousness,  of  gratitude  and  other  senti- 
ments generally  considered  virtuous.  The  indefinite  development 
of  the  individual  by  reason  and  liberty,  and  the  general  welfare  of 
the  community  at  large,  were  the  only  standards  that  he  admitted. 
And  it  should  be  said,  to  his  credit,  that  he  condemned  the  use  of 
violence  and  physical  force  against  government  quite  as  strongly 
as  their  use  by  government.  The  establishment  of  absolute  liberty, 
in  the  confidence  that  it  will  lead  to  absolute  happiness,  was,  at 
first  at  any  rate,  the  main  idea  of  the  Political  Justice,  and  it  is 
easy  to  understand  what  wild  work  it  must  have  made  with  heads 
already  heated  by  the  thunder-weather  of  change  that  was  pervad- 
ing Europe. 

Godwin  has  been  frequently  charged  with  alarm  at  the 
anarchist  phantom  he  had  raised.  It  is  certain  not  merely  that 
he  altered  and  softened  the  Political  Justice  very  much,  but  that 
in  his  next  work  of  the  same  kind,  The  Enquirer,  he  took  both 
a  very  different  line  of  investigation  and  a  different  tone  of 
handling.  In  the  preface  he  represents  it  as  a  sort  of  inductive 
complement  to  the  high  a  priori  scheme  of  his  former  work  ;  but 


36  TUP:  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP 

this  is  not  a  sufficient  account  of  the  matter.  It  is  true  that  his 
paradoxical  rebellion  against  conventions  appears  here  and  there  ; 
and  his  literary  criticism,  which  was  never  strong,  may  be  typified 
by  his  contrast  of  the  "hide-bound  sportiveness "  of  Fielding  with 
the  "  flowing  and  graceful  hilarity "  of  Sterne.  Indeed,  this 
sentence  takes  Godwin's  measure  pretty  finally,  and  shows  that  he 
was  of  his  age,  not  for  all  time.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  fair 
to  say  that  the  essays  on  "  The  Study  of  the  Classics  "  and  the 
"  Choice  of  Reading,"  dealing  with  subjects  on  which,  both  then 
and  since,  oceans  of  cant  and  nonsense  have  been  poured  forth, 
are  nearly  as  sound  as  they  can  be. 

In  his  purely  imaginative  work  he  presents  a  contrast  not  much 
less  strange.  We  may  confine  attention  here  to  the  two  capital 
examples  of  it.  Caleb  Williams  alone  has  survived  as  a  book  of 
popular  reading,  and  it  is  no  small  tribute  to  its  power  that,  a  full 
century  after  its  publication,  it  is  still  kept  on  sale  in  sixpenny 
editions.  Yet  on  no  novel  perhaps  is  it  so  difficult  to  adjust 
critical  judgment,  either  by  the  historical  or  the  personal  methods. 
Both  its  general  theme — the  discovery  of  a  crime  committed 
by  a  man  of  high  reputation  and  unusual  moral  worth,  with  the 
persecution  of  the  discoverer  by  the  criminal — and  its  details, 
are  thoroughly  leavened  and  coloured  by  Godwin's  political  and 
social  views  at  the  time ;  and  either  this  or  some  other  defect  has 
made  it  readable  with  great  difficulty  at  all  times  by  some  persons, 
among  whom  I  am  bound  to  enrol  myself.  Yet  the  ingenuity  of 
its  construction,  in  spite  of  the  most  glaring  impossibilities,  the 
striking  situations  it  contains,  and  no  doubt  other  merits,  have 
always  secured  readers  for  it.  St.  Leon,  a  romance  of  the  elixir 
vita,  has  no  corresponding  central  interest,  and,  save  in  the 
amiable  but  very  conventional  figure  of  the  heroine  Marguerite,  who 
is  said  to  have  been  studied  from  Mary  Wollstonecraft,  no  interest 
of  character;  while  its  defects  of  local  colour  and  historical  truth 
are  glaring.  But  Godwin,  who  was  in  so  many  ways  a  mirror  of 
the  new  thought  of  the  time,  had  caught  by  anticipation  something 
of  its  nascent  spirit  of  romance.  He  is  altogether  a  rather  puzzling 


I  MARY  WOLLSTONECRAFT  37 

person ;  and  perhaps  the  truest  explanation  of  the  puzzle,  as  well 
as  certainly  the  most  comfortable  to  the  critic,  is  that  his  genius 
and  literary  temperament  were  emphatically  crude  and  undevel- 
oped, that  he  was  a  prophet  rather  than  anything  else,  and  that  he 
had  the  incoherencies  and  the  inconsistencies  almost  inseparable 
from  prophecy. 

Even  if  fate  and  metaphysical  aid  had  not  conjoined  Godwin 
and  Mary  Wollstonecraft  in  the  closest  bond  possible  between 
man  and  woman,  it  would  have  been  proper  to  mention  their  names 
together  as  authors.  For  as  Godwin's  "  New  Philosophy  "  was  the 
boldest  attempt  made  by  any  man  of  the  time  in  print  to  overthrow 
received  conventions  of  the  relations  of  man  to  man,  and  incident- 
ally of  man  to  woman,  so  was  his  wife's  Vindication  of  the  Rights 
of  Woman  a  complement  of  it  in  relation  to  the  status  of  the 
other  sex  as  such.  She  was  rather  hardly  treated  in  her  own  time  ; 
Horace  Walpole  calling  her,  it  is  said  (I  have  not  verified  the 
quotation),  a  "hyena  in  petticoats"  :  it  would  be  at  least  as  just  to 
call  Lord  Orford  a  baboon  in  breeches.  And  though  of  late  years 
she  has  been  made  something  of  a  heroine,  it  is  to  be  feared  that 
admiration  has  been  directed  rather  to  her  crotchets  than  to  her 
character.  This  last  appears  to  have  been  as  lovable  as  her  hap 
was  ill.  The  daughter  of  an  Irishman  of  means,  who  squandered 
them  and  became  a  burden  on  his  children ;  the  sister  of  an 
attorney  who  was  selfishly  indifferent  to  his  sisters — she  had  to  fend 
for  herself  almost  entirely.  At  one  time  she  and  her  sisters  kept 
school ;  then  she  was,  thanks  to  the  recommendation  of  Mr.  Prior, 
a  master  at  Eton,  introduced  as  governess  to  the  family  of  Lord 
Kingsborough  ;  then,  after  doing  hack-work  for  Johnson,  the  chief 
Liberal  publisher  of  the  period,  she  went  to  Paris,  and  unluckily 
fell  in  with  a  handsome  scoundrel,  Gilbert  Imlay,  an  American 
soldier.  She  lived  with  him,  he  deserted  her,  and  she  nearly 
committed  the  suicide  which  was  actually  the  fate  of  her  unfortun- 
ate daughter  by  him,  Fanny  Imlay  or  Godwin.  Only  at  the  last  had 
she  a  glimpse  of  happiness.  Godwin,  who  had  some  weaknesses, 
but  who  was  not  a  scoundrel,  met  her,  and  fell  in  love  with  her, 


38  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP. 

and  as  both  had  independently  demonstrated  that  marriage  was  a 
failure,  they  naturally  married ;  but  she  died  a  week  after  giving 
birth  to  a  daughter — the  future  Mrs.  Shelley.  The  Vindication  oj 
the  Rights  of  Woman,  on  which  Mary  Wollstonecraft's  fame  as  an 
author  almost  wholly  rests,  is  in  some  ways  a  book  nearly  as  faulty 
as  it  can  be.  ,  It  is  not  well  written ;  it  is  full  of  prejudices  quite 
as  wrong-headed  as  those  it  combats  ;  it  shows  very  little  know- 
ledge either  of  human  nature  or  of  good  society;  and  its  "niceness," 
to  use  the  word  in  what  was  then  its  proper  sense,  often  goes  near 
to  the  nasty.  But  its  protest  on  the  one  hand  against  the  "proper" 
sentimentality  of  such  English  guides  of  female  youth  as  Drs. 
Fordyce  and  Gregory,  on  the  other  against  the  "  improper "  senti- 
mentality of  Rousseau,  is  genuine  and  generous.  Many  of  its 
positions  and  contentions  may  be  accepted  unhesitatingly  to-day  by 
those  who  are  by  no  means  enamoured  of  advanced  womanhood ; 
and  Mary,  as  contrasted  with  most  of  her  rights-of-women  followers, 
is  curiously  free  from  bumptiousness  and  the  general  qualities  of 
the  virago.  She  had  but  ill  luck  in  life,  and  perhaps  showed  no 
very  good  judgment  in  letters,  but  she  had  neither  bad  brains  nor 
bad  blood ;  and  the  references  to  her,  long  after  her  death,  by 
such  men  as  Southey,  show  the  charm  which  she  exercised. 

With  Godwin  also  is  very  commonly  connected  Thomas 
Holcroft  (or,  as  Lamb  always  preferred  to  spell  the  name, 
"  0tt/^croft "),  a  curiosity  of  literature  and  a  rather  typical 
figure  of  the  time.  Holcroft  was  born  in  London  in  December 
1745,  quite  in  the  lowest  ranks,  and  himself  rose  from  being 
stable-boy  at  Newmarket,  through  the  generally  democratic  trade 
of  shoemaking,  to  quasi  -  literary  positions  as  schoolmaster  and 
clerk,  and  then  to  the  dignity  of  actor.  He  was  about  thirty- 
five  when  he  first  began  regular  authorship ;  and  during  the  rest 
of  his  life  he  wrote  four  novels,  some  score  and  a  half  of  plays, 
and  divers  other  works,  none  of  which  is  so  good  as  his 
Autobiography,  published  after  his  death  by  Haxlitt,  and  said  to 
be  in  part  that  writer's  work.  It  would  have  been  fortunate  for 
Holcroft  if  he  had  confined  himself  to  literature  ;  for  some  of 


HOLCROFT  39 


his  plays,  notably  The  Road  to  Ruin,  brought  him  in  positively 
large  sums  of  money,  and  his  novels  were  fairly  popular.  But 
he  was  a  violent  democrat, — some  indeed  attributed  to  him  the 
origination  of  most  of  the  startling  things  in  Godwin's  Political 
Jtistice, — and  in  1794  he  was  tried,  though  with  no  result,  for 
high  treason,  with  Home  Tooke  and  others.  This  brought  him 
into  the  society  of  the  young  Jacobin  school, — Coleridge,  and  the 
rest, — but  was  disastrous  to  the  success  of  his  plays  ;  and  when  he 
went  abroad  in  1799  he  entered  on  an  extraordinary  business  of 
buying  old  masters  (which  were  rubbish)  and  sending  them  to 
England,  where  they  generally  sold  for  nothing.  He  returned, 
however,  and  died  on  23rd  March  1809. 

Holcroft's  theatre  will  best  receive  such  notice  as  it  requires 
in  connection  with  the  other  drama  of  the  century.  Of  his 
novels,  Alwyn,  the  first,  had  to  do  with  his  experiences  as  an 
actor,  and  Hugh  Trevor  is  also  supposed  to  have  been  more  or 
less  autobiographical.  Holcroft's  chief  novel,  however,  is  Anna 
St.  Ives,  a  book  in  no  less  than  seven  volumes,  though  not  very 
large  ones,  which  was  published  in  1792,  and  which  exhibits  no 
small  affinities  to  Godwin's  Caleb  Williams,  and  indeed  to  the 
Political  Justice  itself.  And  Godwin,  who  was  not  above 
acknowledging  mental  obligations,  if  he  was  rather  ill  at  dis- 
charging pecuniary  ones,  admits  the  influence  which  Holcroft 
had  upon  him.  Anna  St.  Ives,  which,  like  so  many  of  the  other 
novels  of  its  day,  is  in  letters,  is  worth  reading  by  those  who  can 
spare  the  time.  But  it  cannot  compare,  for  mere  amusement, 
with  the  very  remarkable  Memoir  above  referred  to.  Only  about 
a  fourth  of  this  is  said  to  be  in  Holcroft's  own  words ;  but 
Hazlitt  has  made  excellent  matter  of  the  rest,  and  it  includes  a 
good  deal  of  diary  and  other  authentic  work.  In  his  own  part 
Holcroft  shows  himself  a  master  of  the  vernacular,  as  well  as 
(what  he  undoubtedly  was)  a  man  of  singular  shrewdness  and 
strength  of  mental  temper. 

The  Novel  school  of  the  period  (to  which  Holcroft  introduces 
us)  is  full  and  decidedly  interesting,  though  it  contains  at  the 


40  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 


best  one  masterpiece,  Vathek,  and  a  large  number  of  more  or 
less  meritorious  attempts  in  false  styles.  The  kind  was  very 
largely  written — much  more  so  than  is  generally  thought.  Thus 
Godwin,  in  his  early  struggling  days,  and  long  before  the  complete 
success  of  Caleb  Williams,  wrote,  as  has  been  mentioned,  for 
trifling  sums  of  money  (five  and  ten  guineas),  two  or  three  novels 
which  even  the  zeal  of  his  enthusiastic  biographer  does  not  seem 
to  have  been  able  to  recover.  Nor  did  the  circulating  library, 
even  then  a  flourishing  institution,  lack  hands  more  or  less  eminent 
to  work  for  it,  or  customers  to  take  off  its  products.  The  Minerva 
Press,  much  cited  but  little  read,  had  its  origin  in  this  our  time  ; 
and  this  time  is  entitled  to  the  sole  and  single  credit  of  starting 
and  carrying  far  a  bastard  growth  of  fiction,  the  "  tale  of  terror," 
which  continued  to  be  cultivated  in  its  simplest  form  for  at 
least  half  a  century,  and  which  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  quite 
obsolete  yet.  But  as  usual  we  must  proceed  by  special  names, 
and  there  is  certainly  no  lack  of  them.  "Zeluco"  Moore  has 
been  dealt  with  already ;  Day,  the  eccentric  author  of  Sandford 
and  Mcrton,  belongs  mainly  to  an  earlier  period,  and  died,  still  a 
young  man,  in  the  year  of  the  French  Revolution ;  but,  besides 
Holcroft,  Beckford,  Bage,  Cumberland,  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  and  Monk 
Lewis,  with  Mrs.  Inchbald,  are  distinctly  "  illustrations "  of  the 
time,  and  must  have  more  or  less  separate  mention. 

William  Beckford  is  one  of  the  problems  of  English  literature. 
He  was  one  of  the  richest  men  in  England,  and  his  long  life — 
1760  to  1844 — was  occupied  for  the  most  part  not  merely  with 
the  collection,  but  with  the  reading  of  books.  That  he  could 
write  as  well  as  read  he  showed  as  a  mere  boy  by  his  satirical 
Memoirs  of  Painters,  and  by  the  great-in-little  novel  of  I'athek 
(1783),  respecting  the  composition  of  which  in  French  or  English 
divers  fables  are  told.  Then  he  published  nothing  for  forty  years, 
till  in  1834  and  1835  he  issued  his  Travels  in  Italy,  Spain,  and 
Portugal,  recollections  of  his  earliest  youth.  These  travels  have 
extraordinary  merits  of  their  kind;  but  I'athek  is  a  kind  almost  to 
itself.  The  history  of  the  Caliph,  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  satire  on 


BECKFORD— BAGE  41 


unlimited  power,  is  an  eighteenth  century  commonplace  ;  while 
many  traits  in  it  are  obviously  imitated  from  Voltaire.  But  the 
figure  of  Nouronihar,  which  Byron  perhaps  would  have  equalled 
if  he  could,  stands  alone  in  literature  as  a  fantastic  projection  of 
the  potentiality  of  evil  magnificence  in  feminine  character ;  and 
the  closing  scenes  in  the  domain  of  Eblis  have  the  grandeur  of 
Blake  combined  with  that  finish  which  Blake's  temperament, 
joined  to  his  ignorance  of  literature  and  his  lack  of  scholarship, 
made  it  impossible  for  him  to  give.  The  book  is  quite  unique. 
It  could  hardly,  in  some  of  its  weaker  parts  especially,  have  been 
written  at  any  other  time  ;  and  yet  its  greater  characteristics  have 
nothing  to  do  with  that  time.  In  the  florid  kind  of  supernatural 
story  it  has  no  equal.  Only  Dante,  Beckford,  and  Scott  in 
Wandering  Willie's  Tale  have  given  us  Hells  that  are  worthy  of 
the  idea  of  Hell. 

Except  that  both  were  very  much  of  their  time,  it  would  be 
impossible  to  imagine  a  more  complete  contrast  than  that  which 
exists  between  Beckford  and  Bage.  The  former  was,  as  has  been 
said,  one  of  the  richest  men  in  England,  the  creator  of  two 
"Paradises"  at  Fonthill  and  Cintra,  the  absolute  arbiter  of  his 
time  and  his  pleasures,  a  Member  of  Parliament  while  he  chose 
to  be  so,  a  student,  fierce  and  recluse,  the  husband  of  a  daughter 
of  the  Gordons,  and  the  father  of  a  mother  of  the  Hamiltons, 
the  collector,  disperser,  bequeather  of  libraries  almost  unequalled 
in  magnificence  and  choice.  Robert  Bage,  who  was  born  in 
1728  and  died  in  1801,  was  in  some  ways  a  typical  middle-class 
Englishman.  He  was  a  papermaker,  and  the  son  of  a  paper- 
maker  ;  he  was  never  exactly  affluent  nor  exactly  needy ;  he  was 
apparently  a  Quaker  by  education  and  a  freethinker  by  choice ; 
and  between  1781  and  1796,  obliged  by  this  reason  or  that  to 
Stain  the  paper  which  he  made,  he  produced  six  novels  :  Mount 
Hcnmth,  Barham  Downs,  The  Fair  Syrian,  James  Wallace,  Alan 
as  lie  is,  and  Hermsprong.  The  first,  second,  and  fourth  of  these 
were  admitted  by  Scott  to  the  "  Ballantyne  Novels,"  the  others, 
though  Jlcrmsprong  is  admittedly  Bage's  best  work,  were  not. 


12  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 


It  is  impossible  to  say  that  there  is  genius  in  Bage ;  yet  he  is  a 
very  remarkable  writer,  and  there  is  noticeable  in  him  that 
singular  y£«  de  stick  tendency  which  has  reasserted  itself  a  century 
later.  An  imitator  of  Fielding  and  Smollett  in  general  plan, — of 
the  latter  specially  in  the  dangerous  scheme  of  narrative  by 
letter, — Bage  added  to  their  methods  the  purpose  of  advocating 
a  looser  scheme  of  morals  and  a  more  anarchical  system  ol 
government.  In  other  words,  Bage,  though  a  man  well  advanced 
in  years  at  the  date  of  the  Revolution,  exhibits  for  us  distinctly 
the  spirit  which  brought  the  Revolution  about.  He  is  a  com- 
panion of  Godwin  and  of  Mary  Wollstonecraft ;  and  though 
it  must  be  admitted  that,  as  in  other  cases,  the  presence  of 
"  impropriety "  in  him  by  no  means  implies  the  absence  of 
dulness,  he  is  full  of  a  queer  sort  of  undeveloped  and  irregular 
cleverness. 

The  most  famous,  though  not  the  only  novel  of  Richard 
Cumberland,  Henry,  shows  the  same  tendency  to  break  loose 
from  British  decorum,  even  such  decorum  as  had  really  been  in 
the  main  observed  by  the  much  -  abused  pens  of  Fielding, 
Smollett,  and  Sterne  himself;  but  it  has  little  purpose  and  indeed 
little  vigour  of  any  kind.  Cumberland  clung  as  close  as  he  could 
to  the  method  of  Fielding,  including  the  preliminary  dissertation 
or  meditation,  but  he  would  be  a  very  strange  reader  who  should 
mistake  the  two. 

The  school  of  Bage  and  Cumberland,  the  former  of  whom 
bears  some  little  resemblance  to  his  countrywoman  George 
Eliot,  was,  with  or  without  Bage's  purpose,  continued  more  or 
less  steadily ;  indeed,  it  may  be  said  to  be  little  more  than  a 
variant,  with  local  colour,  of  the  ordinary  school  of  novel-writing. 
Hut  it  was  not  this  school  which  was  to  give  tone  to  the  period. 
The  "tale  of  terror"  had  been  started  by  Horace  Walpole  in  the 
Castle  of  Otranto,  and  had,  as  we  have  seen,  received  a  new  and 
brilliant  illustration  in  the  hands  of  Beckford.  But  the  genius  of 
the  author  of  V'athck  could  not  be  followed  ;  the  talent  of  the 
author  of  the  Castle  of  Otranto  was  more  easily  imitated.  How 


MRS.   RADCLIFFE  43 


far  the  practice  of  the  Germans  (who  had  themselves  imitated 
Walpole,  and  whose  work  began  in  the  two  last  decades  of  the 
century  to  have  a  great  reflex  influence  upon  England)  was 
responsible  for  the  style  of  story  which,  after  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and 
Monk  Lewis  had  set  the  fashion,  dominated  the  circulating 
libraries  for  years,  is  a  question  not  easy  and  perhaps  not 
necessary  to  answer  positively.  I  believe  myself  that  no  foreign 
influence  ever  causes  a  change  in  national  taste ;  it  merely  coin- 
cides therewith.  But  the  fact  of  the  set  in  the  tide  is  unmistak- 
able and  undeniable.  For  some  years  the  two  authors  just 
mentioned  rode  paramount  in  the  affections  of  English  novel 
readers ;  before  long  Miss  Austen  devoted  her  early  and 
delightful  effort,  Northanger  Abbey,  to  satirising  the  taste  for  them, 
and  quoted  or  invented  a  well-known  list  of  blood-curdling  titles1; 
the  morbid  talent  of  Maturin  gave  a  fresh  impulse  to  it,  even 
after  the  healthier  genius  of  Scott  had  already  revolutionised  the 
general  scheme  of  novel-writing ;  and  yet  later  still  an  indus- 
trious literary  hack,  Leitch  Ritchie,  was  able  to  issue,  and  it  may 
be  presumed  to  find  readers  for,  examples  of  romance  the  titles  oi 
which  might  strike  a  hasty  practitioner  of  the  kind  of  censure 
usual  in  biblical  criticism  as  designed  parodies  of  Miss  Austen's 
own  catalogue.  The  style,  indeed,  in  the  wide  sense  has  never 
lost  favour.  But  in  the  special  Radcliffian  form  it  reigned  for 
some  thirty  years,  and  was  widely  popular  for  nearly  fifty. 

Anne  Radcliffe,  whose  maiden  name  was  "Ward,  was  bom  on 
9th  July  1764  and  died  on  yth  February  1822.  One  of  her 
novels,  Gaston  de  Blondeville,  was  published  posthumously ;  but 
otherwise  her  whole  literary  production  took  place  between  the 
years  1789  and  1797.  The  first  of  these  years  saw  The  Castles  oj 
Athlin  and  Dunbaync,  a  very  immature  work  ;  the  last  The  Italian, 
which  is  perhaps  the  best.  Between  them  appeared  A  Sicilian 
Romance  (1790),  The  Romance  of  the  Forest  (1791),  and  the  far 


44  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY         CHAP. 

famed  Mysteries  of  Udolpho  in  1795.  Matthew  Gregory  Lewis, 
who,  like  Beckford,  was  a  West-Indian  landowner  and  member 
for  Hindon,  and  was  well-to-do  if  not  extremely  wealthy,  was 
nine  years  younger  than  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  and  did  not  produce 
his  famous  Monk  till  the  same  year  which  saw  Udolpho.  He 
published  a  good  deal  of  other  work  in  prose,  verse,  and  drama ; 
the  most  noteworthy  of  the  second  class  being  Tales  of  Terror, 
to  which  Scott  contributed,  and  the  most  noteworthy  of  the  third 
The  Castle  Spectre.  Lewis,  who,  despite  some  foibles,  was 
decidedly  popular  in  the  literary  and  fashionable  society  of  his 
time,  died  in  1818  at  the  age  of  forty-five  on  his  way  home  from 
the  West  Indies.  Although  he  would  have  us  understand  that 
The  Monk  was  written  some  time  before  its  actual  publication, 
Lewis's  position  as  a  direct  imitator  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe  is  unmis- 
takable ;  and  although  he  added  to  the  characteristics  of  her 
novels  a  certain  appeal  to  "  Lubricity "  from  which  she  was 
completely  free,  the  general  scheme  of  the  two  writers,  as  well 
as  that  of  all  their  school,  varies  hardly  at  all.  The  supernatural 
in  Mrs.  Radcliffe's  case  is  mainly,  if  not  wholly,  what  has  been 
called  "the  explained  supernatural," — that  is  to  say,  the  ap- 
parently ghostly,  and  certainly  ghastly,  effects  are  usually  if  not 
always  traced  to  natural  causes,  while  in  most  if  not  all  of  her 
followers  the  demand  for  more  highly  spiced  fare  in  the  reader, 
and  perhaps  a  defect  of  ingenuity  in  the  writer,  leaves  the  devils 
and  witches  as  they  were.  In  all,  without  exception,  castles  with 
secret  passages,  trap-doors,  forests,  banditti,  abductions,  sliding 
panels,  and  other  apparatus  and  paraphernalia  of  the  kind  play 
the  main  part.  The  actual  literary  value  is,  on  the  whole,  low, 
though  Mrs.  Radcliffe  is  not  without  glimmerings ;  and  it  is  ex 
ceedingly  curious  to  note  that,  just  before  the  historical  novel  was 
once  for  all  started  by  Scott,  there  is  in  all  these  writers  an 
absolute  and  utter  want  of  comprehension  of  historical  propriety, 
of  local  and  temporal  colour,  and  of  all  the  marks  which  were  so 
soon  to  distinguish  fiction.  Yet  at  the  very  same  time  the  yearning 
after  the  historical  is  shown  in  the  must  unmistakable  fashion 


HANNAH  MORE  45 


from  Godwin  down  to  the  Misses  Lee,  Harriet  and  Sophia  (the 
latter  of  whom  in  1783  produced,  in  The  Recess,  a  preposterous 
Elizabethan  story,  which  would  have  liked  to  be  a  historical 
novel),  and  other  known  and  unknown  writers. 

Another  lady  deserves  somewhat  longer  notice.  Hannah 
More,  once  a  substantially  famous  person  in  literature,  is  now 
chiefly  remembered  by  her  association  with  great  men  of  letters, 
such  as  Johnson  in  her  youth,  Macaulay  and  De  Quincey  in  her 
old  age.  She  was  born  as  early  as  1745  near  Bristol,  and  all 
her  life  was  a  Somerset  worthy.  She  began — a  curious  begin- 
ning for  so  serious  a  lady,  but  with  reforming  intentions — to  write 
for  the  stage,  published  The  Search  after  Happiness  when  she 
was  seventeen,  and  had  two  rather  dreary  tragedies,  Percy  and 
the  Fatal  Secret,  acted,  Garrick  being  a  family  friend  of  hers. 
Becoming,  as  her  day  said,  "pious,"  she  wrote  "Sacred  Dramas," 
and  at  Cowslip  Green,  Barley  Wood,  and  Clifton  produced  "Moral 
Essays,"  the  once  famous  novel  of  Cxlebs  in  Search  of  a  Wife, 
and  many  tracts,  the  best  known  of  which  is  The  Shepherd  of 
Salisbury  Plain.  She  died  at  a  great  age  on  yth  September  1833. 
Hannah  More  is  not  to  be  spoken  of  with  contempt,  except 
by  ignorance  or  incompetence.  She  had  real  abilities,  and 
was  a  woman  of  the  world.  But  she  was  very  unfortunately 
parted  in  respect  of  time,  coming  just  before  the  days  when  it 
became  possible  for  a  lady  to  be  decent  in  literature  without  being 
dull. 

If  a  book  and  not  a  chapter  were  allowed  about  this  curious, 
and  on  the  whole  rather  neglected  and  undervalued,  Fifth  Act  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  many  of  its  minor  literary  phenomena 
would  have  to  be  noticed  :  such  as  the  last  state  of  periodicals 
before  the  uprising  of  the  Edinburgh  Review,  and  the  local  literary 
coteries,  the  most  notable  of  which  was  that  of  Norwich,  with  the 
Aldersons,  Savers  the  poet,  who  taught  Southey  and  others  to  try 
blank  verse  in  other  measures  than  the  decasyllabic,  William 
Taylor,  the  apostle  of  German  literature  in  England,  and  others. 
But,  as  it  is,  we  must  concentrate  our  attention  on  its  main  lines. 


46  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY        CHAP 


In  these  lines  the  poetical  pioneers,  the  political  and  other 
satirists,  the  revolutionary  propagandists,  and  the  novelists  of 
terror,  are  the  four  classes  of  writers  that  distinguish  the  period 
1780  to  1800;  and  perhaps  they  distinguish  it  sufficiently,  at  least 
for  those  with  whom  historical  genesis  and  connection  atone  to 
some  extent  for  want  of  the  first  order  of  intrinsic  interest.  In 
less  characteristic  classes  and  in  isolated  literary  personalities  the 
time  was  not  extremely  rich,  though  it  was  not  quite  barren. 
We  can  here  only  notice  cursorily  the  theological  controversialists 
who,  like  Paley,  Horsley,  and  Watson,  waged  war  against  the  fresh 
outburst  of  aggressive  Deism  coinciding  with  the  French  Re- 
volution :  the  scholars,  such  as,  in  their  different  ways,  Dr.  Parr, 
the  Whig  "moon"  of  Dr.  Johnson  ;  Person,  the  famous  Cambridge 
Grecian,  drinker,  and  democrat ;  Taylor  the  Platonist,  a  strange 
person  who  translated  most  of  the  works  of  Plato  and  was  said 
to  have  carried  his  discipleship  to  the  extent  of  a  positive  Pagan 
ism  ;  Gilbert  Wakefield,  a  miscellaneous  writer  who  wrote  rapidly 
and  with  little  judgment,  but  with  some  scholarship  and  even 
some  touches  of  genius,  on  a  great  variety  of  subjects ;  Jacob 
Bryant,  mythologist,  theologian,  and  historical  critic,  a  man  of  vast 
learning  but  rather  weak  critical  power ;  and  many  others.  Of 
some  of  these  we  may  indeed  have  more  to  say  later,  as  also  of 
the  much-abused  Malthus,  whose  famous  book,  in  part  one  of 
the  consequences  of  Godwin,  appeared  in  1798;  while  as  for 
drama,  we  shall  return  to  that  too.  Sheridan  survived  through 
the  whole  of  the  time  and  a  good  deal  beyond  it ;  but  his  best 
work  was  done,  and  the  chief  dramatists  of  the  actual  day  were 
Colman,  Holcroft,  Cumberland,  and  the  farce-writer  O'Keefe,  a 
man  of  humour  and  a  lively  fancy. 

One,  however,  of  the?-'  minor  writers  has  too  much  of  what 
has  been  called  "the  intent  of  origins  "  not  to  have  a  paragraph 
to  himself.  William  Gilpin,  who  prided  himself  on  his  connection 
with  Bernard  Gilpin,  the  so-called  "Apostle  of  the  North"  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  was  born  at  Carlisle.  But  he  is  best  known 
in  connection  with  the  New  Forest,  where,  after  taking  his  degree 


I  GILPIN  47 

at  Oxford,  receiving  orders,  and  keeping  a  school  for  some  time, 
he  was  appointed  to  the  living  of  Boldre.  This  he  held  till 
his  death  in  1814.  Gilpin  was  not  a  secularly-minded  parson  by 
any  means ;  but  his  literary  fame  is  derived  from  the  series  of 
Picturesque  Tours  (The  Highlands,  1778;  The  Wye  and  South 
Wales,  1782;  The  Lakes,  1789;  Forest  Scenery,  1791  ;  and  The 
West  of  England  and  the  Isle  of  Wight,  1798)  which  he  published 
in  the  last  quarter  of  the  century.  They  were  extremely  popular, 
they  set  a  fashion  which  may  be  said  never  to  have  died  out  since, 
and  they  attained  the  seal  of  parody  in  the  famous  Dr.  Syntax  of 
William  Combe  (1741-1823),  an  Eton  and  Oxford  man  who  spent 
a  fortune  and  then  wrote  an  enormous  amount  of  the  most  widely 
various  work  in  verse  and  prose,  of  which  little  but  Syntax  itself 
(1812  sqq^}  is  remembered.  Gilpin  himself  is  interesting  as  an 
important  member  of  "  the  naturals,"  as  they  have  been  oddly  and 
equivocally  called.  His  style  is  much  more  florid  and  less  just 
than  Gilbert  White's,  and  his  observation  correspondingly  less  true. 
But  he  had  a  keen  sense  of  natural  beauty  and  did  much  to  instil 
it  into  others. 

In  all  the  work  of  the  time,  however,  great  and  small,  from 
the  half- unconscious  inspiration  of  Burns  and  Blake  to  the 
common  journey-work  of  book-making,  we  shall  find  the  same 
character — incessantly  recurring,  and  unmistakable  afterwards  if  not 
always  recognisable  at  the  time — of  transition,  of  decay  and  seed- 
time mingled  with  and  crossing  each  other.  There  are  no 
distinct  spontaneous  literary  schools  :  the  forms  which  literature 
takes  are  either  occasional  and  dependent  upon  outward  events, 
such  as  the  wide  and  varied  attack  and  defence  consequent  upon 
the  French  Revolution,  or  else  fantastic,  trivial,  reflex.  Some- 
times the  absence  of  any  distinct  and  creative  impulse  reveals 
itself  in  work  really  good  and  useful,  such  as  the  editing  of  old 
writers,  of  which  the  labours  of  Malone  and  Ritson  are  the  chief 
example  and  the  forgeries  of  Ireland  the  corruption  ;  or  the 
return  to  their  study  aesthetically,  in  which  Headley,  a  now  for- 
gotten critic,  did  good  work.  Sometimes  it  resulted  in  such 


48  THE  END  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY      CHAP.  I 

things  as  the  literary  reputation  (which  was  an  actual  thing  after 
a  kind)  of  persons  like  Sir  James  Bland  Burges,  Under-Secretary 
of  State,  poetaster,  connoisseur,  and  general  fribble.  Yet  all  the 
while,  in  schools  and  universities,  in  London  garrets  and  country 
villages,  there  was  growing  up,  and  sometimes  showing  itself  pretty 
unmistakably,  the  generation  which  was  to  substitute  for  this 
trying  and  trifling  the  greatest  work  in  verse,  and  not  the  least  in 
prose,  that  had  been  done  for  two  hundred  years.  The  Lyrical 
Ballads  of  1798,  the  clarion-call  of  the  new  poetry,  so  clearly 
sounded,  so  inattentively  heard,  might  have  told  all,  and  did  tell 
some,  what  this  generation  was  about  to  do. 


CHAPTER    II 

THE    NEW    POETRY 

THE  opening  years  of  the  eighth  decade  of  the  eighteenth  century 
saw,  in  unusually  close  conjunction,  the  births  of  the  men  who 
were  to  be  the  chief  exponents,  and  in  their  turn  the  chief  deter- 
mining forces,  of  the  new  movement.  The  three  greatest  were 
born,  Wordsworth  in  1770,  Scott  in  1771,  and  Coleridge  in  1772  ; 
Southey,  who  partly  through  accident  was  to  form  a  trinity  with 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  and  who  was  perhaps  the  most  typical 
instance  of  a  certain  new  kind  of  man  of  letters,  followed  in  1774  ; 
while  Lamb  and  Hazlitt,  the  chief  romantic  pioneers  in  criticism, 
Jeffrey  and  Sydney  Smith,  the  chief  classical  reactionaries  therein, 
were  all  born  within  the  decade.  But  the  influence  of  Scott  was 
for  various  reasons  delayed  a  little ;  and  critics  naturally  come 
after  creators.  So  that  the  time-honoured  eminence  of  the 
"Lake  Poets" — Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Southey — need  not 
be  disturbed. 

The  day  of  the  birth  of  William  Wordsworth  was  the  yth  of 
April,  the  place  Cockermouth.  His  father  was  an  attorney,  and,  as 
Lord  Lonsdale's  agent,  a  man  of  some  means  and  position ;  but 
on  his  death  in  1783  the  eccentric  and  unamiable  character  of 
the  then  Lord  Lonsdalc,  by  delaying  the  settlement  of  accounts, 
put  the  family  in  considerable  difficulties.  Wordsworth,  however, 
was  thoroughly  educated  at  Hawkshead  Grammar  School  and 
St.  John's  College,  Cambridge,  where  he  took  his  B.A.  degree  in 
1791.  He  travelled  in  France,  and  for  a  time,  like  many  young 

E 


50  THE  NEW  POETRY 


men,  was  a  fervent  Republican  ;  but,  like  all  the  nobler  of  those 
who  had  "  hailed  the  dawn  of  the  French  Revolution,"  he  lived  to 
curse  its  noon.  He  published  early,  his  first  volume  of  poems 
bearing  the  date  1793  ;  but,  though  that  attention  to  nature  which 
was  always  his  chief  note  appeared  here,  the  work  is  not  by  any 
means  of  an  epoch-making  character.  He  was  averse  from  every 
profession  ;  but  the  fates  were  kind  to  him,  and  a  legacy  of  ^900 
from  his  friend  Raisley  Calvert  made  a  man  of  such  simple  tastes 
as  his  independent,  for  a  time  at  least.  On  the  strength  of  it  he 
settled  first  at  Racedown  in  Dorset,  and  then  at  Alfoxden  in 
Somerset,  in  the  companionship  of  his  sister  Dorothy  ;  and  at  the 
second  of  the  two  places  in  the  neighbourhood  of  Coleridge. 
Massive  and  original  as  Wordsworth's  own  genius  was,  it  is  almost 
impossible  to  exaggerate  the  effect,  both  in  stimulus  and  guidance, 
of  the  influence  of  these  two ;  for  Dorothy  Wordsworth  was  a 
woman  of  a  million,  and  Coleridge,  marvellous  as  were  his  own 
powers,  was  almost  more  marvellous  in  the  unique  Socratic 
character  of  his  effect  on  those  who  possessed  anything  to 
work  upon.  The  two  poets  produced  in  1798  the  Lyrical 
Ballads,  among  the  contents  of  which  it  is  sufficient  to  mention 
Tintern  Abbey  and  The  Ancient  Mariner ;  and  they  subsequently 
visited  Germany  together.  Then  Wordsworth  returned  to  his 
native  lakes  and  never  left  them  for  long,  abiding  first  at  or 
near  Grasmere,  and  from  1813  at  his  well-known  home  of  Rydal 
Mount.  When  Lord  Lonsdale  died  in  1802,  his  successor 
promptly  and  liberally  settled  the  Wordsworth  claims.  The  poet 
soon  married,  his  sister  still  living  with  him  ;  and  Lord  Lonsdale, 
not  satisfied  with  atoning  for  his  predecessor's  injustice,  procured 
him,  in  the  year  of  his  migration  to  Rydal,  the  office  of  Distributor 
of  Stamps  for  Westmoreland — an  office  which  was  almost  a 
sinecure,  and  was,  for  a  man  of  Wordsworth's  tastes,  more  than 
amply  paid.  It  is  curious,  and  a  capital  instance  to  prove  that  the 
malignity  of  fortune  has  itself  been  maligned,  that  the  one  English 
poet  who  was  constitutionally  incapable  of  writing  for  bread  never 
was  under  any  necessity  to  do  so.  For  full  sixty  years  Wordsworth 


WORDSWORTH  51 


wandered  much,  read  little,  meditated  without  stint,  and  wrote, 
though  never  hurriedly,  yet  almost  incessantly.  The  dates  of  his 
chief  publications  may  be  best  given  in  a  note.1  For  some  years 
his  poems  were  greeted  by  the  general  public  and  by  a  few  of  its 
critical  guides  with  storms  of  obloquy  and  ridicule ;  but  Words- 
worth, though  never  indifferent  to  criticism,  was  severely  disdainful 
of  it,  and  held  on  his  way.  From  the  first  the  brightest  spirits  of 
England  had  been  his  passionate  though  by  no  means  always  un- 
discriminating  admirers  ;  and  about  the  end  of  the  first  quarter  of 
the  century  the  public  began  to  come  round.  Oxford,  always  first 
to  recognise,  if  not  always  first  to  produce,  the  greatest  achieve- 
ments of  English  literature,  gave  him  its  D.C.L.  in  1839.  He 
received  a  pension  of  ^300  a  year  in  1842  from  Sir  Robert  Peel, 
who,  unlike  most  English  Prime  Ministers,  cared  for  men  of 
letters ;  the  laureateship  fell  to  him  in  right  of  right  on  Southey's 
death  in  1843,  and  he  died  on  the  23rd  of  April  1850,  having 
come  to  fourscore  years  almost  without  labour,  and  without  many 
heavy  sorrows. 

Of  his  character  not  much  need  be  said.  Like  that  of  Milton, 
whom  he  in  many  ways  resembled  (they  had  even  both,  as  Hartley 
Coleridge  has  pointed  out,  brothers  named  Christopher),  it  was 
not  wholly  amiable,  and  the  defects  in  it  were  no  doubt  aggravated 
by  his  early  condition  (for  it  must  be  remembered  that  till  he 
was  two-and-thirty  his  prospects  were  of  the  most  disquieting  char- 
acter), by  the  unjust  opposition  which  the  rise  of  his  reputation 
met  with,  and  by  his  solitary  life  in  contact  only  with  worshipping 
friends  and  connections.  One  of  these  very  worshippers  con- 
fesses that  he  was  "inhumanly  arrogant";  and  he  was  also,  what 
all  arrogant  men  are  not,  rude.  He  was  entirely  self-centred,  and 
his  own  circle  of  interests  and  tastes  was  not  wide.  It  is  said 
that  he  would  cut  books  with  a  buttery  knife,  and  after  that  it  is 

1  Lyrical  Ballads,  1798,  and  with  additions  1800  ;  Poems,  1807  (in  these 
volumes  even  some  adorers  have  allowed  all  his  greatest  work  to  be  included)  ; 
The  Excursion,  1814;  The  White  Doe  of  Rylstone,  1815;  Sonnets  on  the  Rirci- 
Iltiddon,  and  others,  1819-20.  In  1836  he  brought  out  a  collected  edition  of  his 
poems  in  six  volumes.  The  Prelude  was  posthumous. 


52  THE  NEW  POETRY 


probably  unnecessary  to  say  any  more,  for  the  fact  "  surprises  by 
itself"  an  indictment  of  almost  infinite  counts. 

But  his  genius  is  not  so  easily  despatched.  I  have  said  that 
it  is  now  as  a  whole  universally  recognised,  and  1  cannot  but 
think  that  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  was  wrong  when  he  gave  a 
contrary  opinion,  writing  in  the  year  1879.  He  must  have  been 
biassed  by  his  own  remembrance  of  earlier  years,  when  Wordsworth 
was  still  a  bone  of  contention.  I  should  say  that  never  since  I 
myself  was  an  undergraduate,  never  for  a  generation  before 
1900  has  there  been  any  dispute  among  Englishmen  whose 
opinion  was  worth  taking,  and  who  cared  for  poetry  at  all,  on  the 
general  merits  of  Wordsworth.  But  this  agreement  is  compatible 
with  a  vast  amount  of  disagreement  in  detail ;  and  Mr.  Arnold's 
own  estimate,  as  where  he  compares  Wordsworth  with  Moliere 
(who  was  not  a  poet  at  all,  though  he  sometimes  wrote  very 
tolerable  verse),  weighs  him  with  poets  of  the  second  class  like 
Gray  and  Manzoni,  and  finally  admits  him  for  his  dealings  with 
"  life,"  introduces  fresh  puzzlements  into  the  valuation.  There  is 
only  one  principle  on  which  that  valuation  can  properly  proceed, 
and  this  is  the  question,  "  Is  the  poet  rich  in  essentially  poetical 
moments  of  the  highest  power  and  kind  ? "  And  by  poetical 
moments  I  mean  those  instances  of  expression  which,  no  mattei 
what  their  subject,  their  intention,  or  their  context  may  be,  cause 
instantaneously  in  the  fit  reader  a  poetical  impression  of  the 
intensest  and  most  moving  quality. 

Let  us  consider  the  matter  from  this  point  of  view.1 

The  chief  poetical  influences  under  which  Wordsworth  began 

1  It  must  be  remembered  that  Wordsworth  was  a  prose-writer  of  considerable 
excellence  and  of  no  small  volume.  Many  people  no  doubt  were  surprised  when 
Dr.  Grosart,  by  collecting  his  pamphlets,  his  essays,  his  notes,  and  his  letters, 
managed  to  fill  three  large  octavo  volumes.  But  his  poetry  so  far  outweighs  his 
prose  (though,  like  most  poets,  he  could  write  admirably  in  his  pedestrian  style 
when  he  chose)  that  hi-;  utterances  in  "the  other  harmony"  need  not  be  specially 
considered.  The  two  most  considerable  examples  of  this  prose  are  the  pamphlet 
on  The  Ci>rti't>if!\>n  of  Cintra  and  the  five-and-twenty  years  later  GuiJ>-  to  the 
Lakes.  But  minor  essays,  letters  of  a  more  or  less  formal  character,  and  prefaces 
and  notes  to  the  poems,  make  up  a  goodly  total  ;  and  always  display  a  genius 
germane  to  that  of  the  poems. 


WORDSWORTH  53 


to  write  appear  to  have  been  those  of  Burns  and  Milton ;  both 
were  upon  him  to  the  last,  and  both  did  him  harm  as  well  as 
good.  It  was  probably  in  direct  imitation  of  Burns,  as  well  as  in 
direct  opposition  to  the  prevailing  habits  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
that  he  conceived  the  theory  of  poetic  diction  which  he  defended 
in  prose  and  exemplified  in  verse.  The  chief  point  of  this  theory 
was  the  use  of  the  simplest  and  most  familiar  language,  and  the 
double  fallacy  is  sufficiently  obvious.  Wordsworth  forgot  that 
the  reason  why  the  poetic  diction  of  the  three  preceding  genera- 
tions had  become  loathsome  was  precisely  this,  that  it  had  become 
familiar ;  while  the  familiar  Scots  of  Burns  was  in  itself  un- 
familiar to  the  English  ear.  On  the  other  hand,  he  borrowed 
from  Milton,  and  used  more  and  more  as  he  grew  older,  a 
distinctly  stiff  and  unvernacular  form  of  poetic  diction  itself.  Few 
except  extreme  and  hopeless  Wordsworthians  now  deny  that  the 
result  of  his  attempts  at  simple  language  was  and  is  far  more 
ludicrous  than  touching.  The  wonderful  Affliction  of  Margaret 
does  not  draw  its  power  from  the  neglect  of  poetic  diction,  but 
from  the  intensity  of  emotion  which  would  carry  off  almost  any 
diction,  simple  or  affected ;  while  on  the  other  hand  such  pieces 
as  "We  are  Seven,"  as  the  "Anecdote  for  Fathers,"  and  as  "  Alice 
Fell,"  not  to  mention  "Betty  Foy"  and  others,  which  specially  in- 
furiated Wordsworth's  own  contemporaries,  certainly  gain  nothing 
from  their  namby-pamby  dialect,  and  sometimes  go  near  to  losing 
the  beauty  that  really  is  in  them  by  dint  of  it.  Moreover,  the 
Miltonic  blank  verse  and  sonnets — at  their  best  of  a  stately 
magnificence  surpassed  by  no  poet — have  a  tendency  to  become 
heavy  and  even  dull  when  the  poetic  fire  fails  to  fuse  and  shine 
through  them.  In  fact  it  may  be  said  of  Wordsworth,  as  of  most 
poets  with  theories,  that  his  theories  helped  him  very  little,  and 
sometimes  hindered  him  a  great  deal. 

His  real  poetical  merits  are  threefold,  and  lie  first  in  the  in- 
explicable, the  ultimate,  felicity  of  phrase  which  all  great  poets  must 
have,  and  which  only  great  poets  have;  secondly,  in  his  matchless 
power  of  delineating  natural  objects;  and  lastly,  more  properly,  and 


54  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

with  most  special  rarity  of  all,  in  the  half-pantheistic  mysticism 
which  always  lies  behind  this  observation,  and  which  every  now 
and  then  breaks  through  it,  puts  it,  as  mere  observation,  aside,  and 
blazes  in  unmasked  fire  of  rapture.  The  summits  of  Words- 
worth's poetry,  the  "Lines  Written  at  Tintern  Abbey"  and  the 
'•  Ode  on  Intimations  of  Immortality," — poems  of  such  astonishing 
magnificence  that  it  is  only  more  astonishing  that  any  one 
should  have  read  them  and  failed  to  see  what  a  poet  had  come 
before  the  world, — are  the  greatest  of  many  of  these  revelations 
or  inspirations.  It  is  indeed  necessary  to  read  Wordsworth 
straight  through — a  proceeding  which  requires  that  the  reader 
shall  be  in  good  literary  training,  but  is  then  feasible,  profitable, 
and  even  pleasant  enough — to  discern  the  enormous  height  at 
which  the  great  Ode  stands  above  its  author's  other  work.  The 
Tintern  Abbey  lines  certainly  approach  it  nearest :  many  smaller 
things — "The  Affliction  of  Margaret,"  "The  Daffodils,"  and  others 
— group  well  under  its  shadow,  and  innumerable  passages  and  even 
single  lines,  such  as  that  which  all  good  critics  have  noted  as 
lightening  the  darkness  of  the  Prelude — 

Voyaging  through  strange  seas  of  thought,  alone — 

must  of  course  be  added  to  the  poet's  credit.  But  the  Ode  remains 
not  merely  the  greatest,  but  the  one  really,  dazzlingly,  supremely 
great  thing  he  ever  did.  Its  theory  has  been  scorned  or  impugned 
by  some ;  parts  of  it  have  even  been  called  nonsense  by  critics  of 
weight.  But,  sound  or  unsound,  sense  or  nonsense,  it  is  poetry, 
and  magnificent  poetry,  from  the  first  line  to  the  last — poetry  than 
which  there  is  none  better  in  any  language,  poetry  such  as  there 
is  not  perhaps  more  than  a  small  volume-full  in  all  languages. 
The  second  class  of  merit,  that  of  vivid  observation,  abounds 
wherever  the  poems  are  opened.  But  the  examples  of  the  first 
are  chiefly  found  in  the  lyrics  "  My  Heart  leaps  up,"  "  The 
Sparrow's  Nest  "  ;  the  famous  daffodil  poem  which  Jeffrey  thought 
"stuff,"  which  some  say  Dorothy  wrote  chiefly,  and  which  is 
almost  perfect  of  its  kind  ;  the  splendid  opening  of  the  "  Lines 


WORDSWORTH  55 


to  Hartley  Coleridge,"  which  connect  themselves  with  the 
"  Immortality  Ode  "  ;  the  exquisite  group  of  the  "  Cuckoo,"  the 
best  patches  of  the  Burns  poems,  and  the  three  "  Yarrows  " ;  the 
"  Peel  Castle  "  stanzas ;  and,  to  cut  a  tedious  catalogue  short,  the 
hideously  named  but  in  parts  perfectly  beautiful  "  Effusion  on  the 
Death  of  James  Hogg,"  the  last  really  masterly  thing  that  the  poet 
did.  In  some  of  these  we  may  care  little  for  the  poem  as  a  whole, 
nothing  for  the  moral  the  poet  wishes  to  draw.  But  the  poetic 
moments  seize  us,  the  poetic  flash  dazzles  our  eyes,  and  the 
whole  divine  despair,  or  not  more  divine  rapture,  which  poetry 
causes,  comes  upon  us. 

One  division  of  Wordsworth's  work  is  so  remarkable  that  it 
must  have  such  special  and  separate  mention  as  it  is  here  possible 
to  give  it ;  it  contains  his  practice  in  the  sonnet,  wherein,  to  some 
tastes,  he  stands  only  below  Shakespeare  and  on  a  level  with 
Milton.  The  sonnet,  after  being  long  out  of  favour,  paying  for  its 
popularity  between  Wyatt  and  Milton  bv  neglect,  had,  principally 
it  would  seem  on  the  very  inadequate  example  of  Bowles  (see 
infra},  become  a  very  favourite  form  with  the  new  Romantics. 
But  none  of  them  wrote  it  with  the  steady  persistence,  and  none 
except  Keats  with  the  occasional  felicity,  of  Wordsworth.  Its 
thoughtfulness  suited  his  bent,  and  its  limits  frustrated  his 
prolixity,  though,  it  must  be  owned,  he  somewhat  evaded  this 
benign  influence  by  writing  in  series.  And  the  sonnets  on  "  The 
Venetian  Republic,"  on  the  "Subjugation  of  Switzerland,"  that 
beginning  "  The  world  is  too  much  with  us,"  that  in  November 
1806,  the  first  "Personal  Talk,"  the  magnificent  "Westminster 
Bridge,"  and  the  opening  at  least  of  that  on  Scott's  departure 
from  Abbotsford,  are  not  merely  among  the  glories  of  Wordsworth, 
they  are  among  the  glories  of  English  poetry. 

Unfortunately  these  moments  of  perfection  are,  in  the  poet's 
whole  work,  and  especially  in  that  part  of  it  which  was  composed 
in  the  later  half  of  his  long  life,  by  no  means  very  frequent- 
Wordsworth  was  absolutely  destitute  of  humour,  from  which  it 
necessarily  followed  that  his  self-criticism  was  either  non  existent 


$6  THE  NEW  POETRY 


or  constantly  at  fault.  His  verse  was  so  little  facile,  it  paid  so  little 
regard  to  any  of  the  common  allurements  of  narrative-interest  or 
varied  subject,  it  was  so  necessary  for  it  to  reach  the  full  white  heat, 
,  the  jibsolute  instant  of  poetic  projection,  that  when  it  was  not  very 
good  it  was  apt  to  be  scarcely  tolerable.  It  is  nearly  impossible 
to  be  duller  than  Wordsworth  at  his  dullest,  and  unluckily  it  is 
as  impossible  to  find  a  poet  of  anything  like  his  powers  who  has 
given  himself  the  license  to  be  dull  so  often  and  at  such  length, 
The  famous  "  Would  he  had  blotted  a  thousand  "  applies  to  him 
with  as  much  justice  as  it  was  unjust  in  its  original  application  ;  and 
it  is  sometimes  for  pages  together  a  positive  struggle  to  remember 
that  one  is  reading  one  of  the  greatest  of  English  poets,  and  a  poet 
whose  influence  in  making  others  poets  has  been  second  hardly 
to  that  of  Spenser,  of  Keats,  or  of  the  friend  who  follows  him  in 
our  survey. 

Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  was  born  in  Devonshire,  at  Ottery 
St.  Mary,  of  which  place  his  father  was  vicar,  on  the  2ist  October 
1772.  The  family  was  merely  respectable  before  his  day,  but 
since  it  has  been  of  very  unusual  distinction,  intellectual  and  other. 
He  went  to  Christ's  Hospital  when  he  was  not  quite  ten  years  old, 
and  in  1791  was  admitted  to  an  exhibition  at  Jesus  College, 
Cambridge,  with  his  thoughts  already  directed  to  poetry  by 
the  sonnets  of  Bowles  above  mentioned,  and  with  a  reputation, 
exaggerated  perhaps,  but  certainly  not  invented,  in  Lamb's  famous 
"  Elia  "  paper  on  his  old  school.  Indeed,  high  as  is  Coleridge's 
literary  position  on  the  strength  of  his  writing  alone,  his  talk  and 
its  influence  on  hearers  have  been  unanimously  set  higher  still. 
He  did  very  well  at  first,  gaining  the  Browne  Medal  for  Greek 
Verse  and  distinguishing  himself  for  the  Craven  Scholarship ;  but 
he  speedily  fell  in  love,  in  debt,  it  is  suspected  in  drink,  and  it  is 
known  into  various  political  and  theological  heresies.  He  left 
Cambridge  and  enlisted  at  Reading  in  the  i5th  Light  Dragoons. 
He  obtained  his  discharge,  however,  in  three  or  four  months,  and 
no  notice  except  a  formal  admonition  appears  to  have  been  taken 
of  his  resuming  his  position  at  Cambridge.  Indeed  he  was  shortly 


COLERIDGE  57 


after  elected  to  a  Foundation  Scholarship.  But  in  the  summer  of 
1794  he  visited  Oxford,  and  after  he  had  fallen  in  with  Southey, 
whose  views  were  already  Jacobinical,  the  pair  engaged  themselves 
to  Pantisocracy l  and  the  Miss  Frickers.  This  curious  and  often 
told  story  cannot  be  even  summarised  here.  Its  immediate  result 
was  that  Coleridge  left  the  University  without  taking  a  degree,  and, 
though  not  at  once,  married  Sarah  Fricker  in  October  1795. 
Thenceforward  he  lived  on  literature  and  his  friends,  especially 
the  latter.  He  tried  Unitarian  preaching  and  newspaper  work, 
of  which  at  one  time  or  another  he  did  a  good  deal.  The  curious 
ins  and  outs  of  Coleridge's  strange  though  hardly  eventful  life  have, 
after  being  long  most  imperfectly  known,  been  set  forth  in  fullest 
measure  by  Mr.  Dykes  Campbell.  It  must  suffice  here  to  say 
that,  after  much  wandering,  being  unable  or  unwilling  to  keep 
house  with  his  own  family,  he  found  asylums,  first  with  some  kind 
folk  named  Morgan,  and  then  in  the  house  of  Mr.  Gillman  at 
Hampstead,  where  for  years  he  held  forth  to  rising  men  of 
letters,  and  where  he  died  on  the  25th  June  1834.  His  too 
notorious  craving  for  opium  had  never  been  conquered,  though 
it  had  latterly  been  kept  in  some  check. 

Despite  this  unfortunate  failing,  and  his  general  inability  to 
carry  out  any  schemes  of  work  on  the  great  scale,  Coleridge's 
literary  production  was  very  considerable,  and,  except  the  verse, 
it  has  never  been  completely  collected  or  systematically  edited. 
He  began  verse-writing  very  early,  and  early  found  a  vent  for  it  in 
the  Morning  Chronicle,  then  a  Radical  organ.  He  wrote  The 
Fall  of  Robespierre  in  conjunction  with  Southey  in  1794,  and 
published  it.  Some  prose  pamphlets  followed,  and  then  Cottle, 
the  Bristol  providence  of  this  group  of  men  of  letters,  offered 
thirty  guineas  for  a  volume  of  poems,  which  duly  appeared  in 
1796.  Meanwhile  Coleridge  had  started  a  singular  newspaper 
called  The  Watchman,  which  saw  ten  numbers,  appearing  every 

1  This  word,  as  well  as  "  Aspheterism,"  which  has  had  a  less  general  currency, 
was  a  characteristic  coinage  of  Coleridge's  to  designatt  a  kind  of  Communism, 
partly  based  on  the  speculations  of  Godwin,  and  intended  to  be  carried  intf 
practice  in  America. 


58  THE  NEW  POETRY 


eighth  day.  The  Lyrical  JJal/ads  followed  in  1798,  and  mean- 
while Coleridge  had  written  the  play  of  Osorio  (to  appear  long 
afterwards  as  Remorse),  had  begun  Christabel,  and  had  contributed 
some  of  his  best  poems  to  the  Morning  Post.  His  German  visit 
(see  ante)  produced  among  other  things  the  translation  of  Wallen- 
stein,  a  translation  far  above  the  original.  Some  poetry  and  much 
newspaper  work  filled  the  next  ten  years,  with  endless  schemes  ; 
but  in  1807  Coleridge  began  to  lecture  at  the  Royal  Institution — 
a  course  somewhat  irregularly  delivered,  and  almost  entirely  un- 
reported.  1809  saw  his  second  independent  periodical  venture, 
The  friend,  the  subsequent  reprint  of  which  as  a  book  is  com- 
pletely rewritten.  In  1811-12  he  delivered  his  second  course 
of  lectures,  this  time  on  his  own  account.  It  was  followed  by  two 
others,  and  in  1813  Remorse  was  produced  at  Drury  Lane,  had  a 
fair  success,  and  brought  the  author  some  money.  Chris  label, 
with  Kubla  Khan,  appeared  in  1816,  and  the  JBiographia  Literaria 
next  year ;  Zapolya  and  the  rewritten  Friend  the  year  after,  when 
also  Coleridge  gave  a  new  course  of  lectures,  and  yet  another,  the 
last.  Aids  to  Reflection,  in  1825,  was  the  latest  important  work  he 
issued  himself,  though  in  1828  he  superintended  a  collection  of 
his  poems.  Such  of  the  rest  of  his  work  as  is  in  existence  in  a 
collected  form  has  been  printed  or  reprinted  since. 

A  more  full  account  of  the  appearance  of  Coleridge's  work  than 
is  desirable  or  indeed  possible  in  most  cases  here  has  been  given, 
because  it  is  important  to  convey  some  idea  of  the  astonishingly 
piecemeal  fashion  in  which  it  reached  the  world.  To  those  who 
have  studied  the  author's  life  of  opium-eating  ;  of  constant  wander- 
ing from  place  to  place  ;  of  impecuniotisness  so  utter  that,  after  all 
the  painstaking  of  the  modern  biographer,  and  after  full  allowance 
for  the  ravens  who  seem  always  to  have  been  ready  to  feed  him,  it 
is  a  mystery  how  he  escaped  the  workhouse ;  of  endless  schemes 
and  endless  non-performance — it  is  only  a  wonder  that  anything  of 
Coleridge's  ever  reached  the  public  except  in  newspaper  columns. 
As  it  was,  while  his  most  ambitiously  planned  books  were  never 
written  at  all,  most  of  those  which  did  reach  the  press  were  years 


COLERIDGE  59 


in  getting  through  it ;  and  Southey,  on  one  occasion,  after  waiting 
fifteen  months  for  the  conclusion  of  a  contribution  of  Coleridge's 
to  Omniana,  had  to  cancel  the  sheet  in  despair.  The  collection, 
after  many  years,  by  Mr.  Ernest  Coleridge  of  his  grandfather's 
letters  has  by  no  means  completely  removed  the  mystery  which 
hangs  over  Coleridge's  life  and  character.  We  see  a  little  more, 
but  we  do  not  see  the  whole ;  and  we  are  still  unable  to  understand 
what  strange  impediments  there  were  to  the  junction  of  the  two 
ends  of  power  and  performance.  A  rigid  judge  might  almost  say, 
that  if  friends  had  not  been  so  kind,  fate  had  been  kinder,  and 
that  instead  of  helping  they  hindered,  just  as  a  child  who  is  never 
allowed  to  tumble  will  never  learn  to  walk. 

The  enormous  tolerance  of  friends,  however,  which  alone 
enabled  him  to  produce  anything,  was  justified  by  the  astonishing 
genius  to  which  its  possessor  gave  so  unfair  a  chance.  __As  a 
thinker,  although  the  evidence  is  too  imperfect  to  justify  very 
dogmatic  conclusions,  the  opinion  of  the  best  authorities,  from 
which  there  is  little  reason  for  differing,  is  that  Coleridge  was 
much  more  stimulating  than  intrinsically  valuable.  His  Aids  to 
Reflection,  his  most  systematic  work,  is  disappointing ;  and,  with 
The  Friend  and  the  rest,  is  principally  valuable  as  exhibiting  and 
inculcating  an  attitude  of  mind  in  which  the  use  of  logic  is  not,  as 
in  most  eighteenth  century  philosophers,  destructive,  but  is  made 
to  consist  with  a  wide  license  for  the  employment  of  imagination 
and  faith.  He  borrowed  a  great  deal  from  the  Germans,  and  he 
at  least  sometimes  forgot  that  he  had  borrowed  a  great  deal  from 
our  own  older  writers. 

So,  too,  precise  examination  of  his  numerous  but  fragmentary 
remains  as  a  literary  critic  makes  it  necessary  to  take  a  great  deal 
for  granted.  Here,  also,  he  Germanised  much ;  and  it  is  not 
certain,  even  with  the  aid  of  his  fragments,  that  he  was  the  equal 
either  of  Lamb  or  of  Hazlitt  in  insight.  Perhaps  his  highest  claim 
is  that,  in  the  criticism  of  philosophy,  of  religion,  and  cf  litera- 
ture alike,  he  expressed,  and  was  even  a  little  ahead  of,  the  noblei 
bent  and  sympathy  of  his  contemporaries.  We  are  still  content 


6o  THE  NEW  POETRY 


to  assign  to  Coleridge,  perhaps  without  any  very  certain  title-deeds, 
the  invention  of  that  more  catholic  way  of  looking  at  English 
literature  which  can  relish  the  Middle  Ages  without  doing  injustice 
to  contemporaries,  and  can  be  enthusiastic  for  the  seventeenth 
century  without  contemning  the  eighteenth.1  To  him  more  than 
to  any  single  man  is  also  assigned  (and  perhaps  rightly,  though 
some  of  his  remarks  on  the  Church,  even  after  his  rally  to  ortho- 
doxy, are  odd)  the  great  ecclesiastical  revival  of  the  Oxford 
Movement ;  and  it  is  certain  that  he  had  not  a  little  to  do  with 
the  abrupt  discarding  of  the  whole  tradition  of  Locke,  Berkeley 
and  Hartley  only  excepted.  Difficult  as  it  may  be  to  give 
distinct  chapter  and  verse  for  these  assignments  from  the  formless 
welter  of  his  prose  works,  no  good  judge  has  ever  doubted 
their  validity,  with  the  above  and  other  exceptions  and  guards. 
It  may  be  very  difficult  to  present  Coleridge's  assets  in  prose  in  a 
liquid  form  ;  but  few  doubt  their  value. 

It  is  very  different  with  his  poetry.  Here,  too,  the  disastrous, 
the  almost  ruinous  results  of  his  weaknesses  appear.  When  one 
begins  to  sift  and  riddle  the  not  small  mass  of  his  verse,  it  shrinks 
almost  appallingly  in  bulk.  Wallenstein,  though  better  than  the 
original,  is  after  all  only  a  translation.  Remorse  (either  under  that 
name  or  as  Osorio)  and  Zapolya  are  not  very  much  better  than  the 
contemporary  or  slightly  later  work  of  Talfourd  and  Milman. 
The  Fall  of  Robespierre  is  as  absurd,  and  not  so  amusing,  as 
Southey's  unassisted  Wat  Tyler.  Of  the  miscellaneous  verse 
with  which,  after  these  huge  deductions,  we  are  left,  much  is  verse- 
impromptu,  often  learned  and  often  witty,  for  Coleridge  was  (in 
early  days  at  any  rate)  abundantly  provided  with  both  wit  and 
humour,  but  quite  occasional.  Much  more  consists  of  mere 
Juvenilia.  Even  of  the  productions  of  his  best  times  (the  last 
lustrum  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  a  lucid  interval  about  1816) 

1  Yet  this  praise  can  only  be  assigned  to  Coleridge  with  large  allowance.  He 
was  always  unjust  to  his  own  immediate  predecessors,  Johnson,  Gibbon,  etc. , 
and  he  was  not  too  sensible  of  the  real  merits  of  Pope  or  even  of  Dryden.  In  this 
respect  Leigh  Hunt,  an  immeasurably  weaker  thinker,  had  a  much  more  catholic 
taste.  And  it  is  not  certain  that,  as  a  mere  prose-writer,  Coleridge  was  a  very 
good  prose-writer. 


COLERIDGE  61 


much  is  not  very  good.  Religious  Musings,  though  it  has  had  its 
admirers,  is  terribly  poor  stuff.  The  Monody  on  the  Death  of 
Chatterton  might  have  been  written  by  fifty  people  during  the 
century  before  it.  The  Destiny  of  Nations  is  a  feeble  rant ;  but 
the  Ode  on  the  Departing  Year,  though  still  unequal,  still  con- 
ventional, strikes  a  very  different  note.  The  Three  Graves,  though 
injured  by  the  namby-pambiness  which  was  still  thought  incumbent 
in  ballads,  again  shows  no  vulgar  touch.  And  then,  omitting  for 
the  moment  Kubla  Khan,  which  Coleridge  said  he  wrote  in  1797, 
but  which  was  never  published  till  1816,  we  come  to  The  Rime  of 
the  Ancient  Mariner  and  the  birth  of  the  new  poetry  in  England. 
Here  the  stutters  and  flashes  of  Blake  became  coherent  speech 
and  steady  blaze ;  here  poetry,  which  for  a  century  and  a  half  had 
been  curbing  her  voice  to  a  genteel  whisper  or  raising  it  only  to 
a  forensic  declamation,  which  had  at  best  allowed  a  few  wood- 
notes  to  escape  here  and  there  as  if  by  mistake,  spoke  out  loud 
and  clear. 

If  this  statement  seems  exaggerated  (and  it  is  certain 
that  at  the  time  of  the  appearance  of  the  Ancient  Mariner  not 
even  Wordsworth,  not  even  Southey  quite  relished  it,  while  there 
has  always  been  a  sect  of  dissidents  against  it),  two  others  will 
perhaps  seem  more  extravagant  still.  The  second  is  that,  with 
the  exception  of  this  poem,  of  Kubla  Khan,  of  Christabel,  and  of 
Love,  all  of  them,  according  to  Coleridge,  written  within  a  few 
months  of  each  other  in  1797-98,  he  never  did  anything  of  the  first 
class  in  poetry.  The  third  is  that  these  four — though  Christabel 
itself  does  not  exceed  some  fifteen  hundred  lines  and  is  decidedly 
unequal,  though  the  Ancient  Mariner  is  just  over  six  hundred 
and  the  other  two  are  quite  short  —  are  sufficient  between 
them  to  rank  their  author  among  the  very  greatest  of  English 
poets.  It  is  not  possible  to  make  any  compromise  on  this  point ; 
for  upon  it  turns  an  entire  theory  and  system  of  poetical  criticism. 
Those  who  demand  from  poetry  a  "criticism  of  life,"  those  who 
will  have  it  that  "all  depends  on  the  subject,"  those  who  want 
"moral"  or  "construction"  or  a  dozen  other  things, — all  good  in 


62  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

their  way,  most  of  them  compatible  with  poetry  and  even  helpful 
to  it,  but  none  of  them  essential  thereto, — can  of  course  never 
accept  this  estimate.  Mrs.  Barbauld  said  that  The  Ancient 
Mariner  was  "improbable";  and  to  this  charge  it  must  plead 
guilty  at  once.  Kubla  Khan,  which  I  should  rank  as  almost  the 
best  of  the  four,  is  very  brief,  and  is  nothing  but  a  dream,  and  a 
fragment  of  a  dream.  Love  is  very  short  too,  and  is  flawed  by 
some  of  the  aforesaid  namby-pambiness,  from  which  none  of  the 
Lake  school  escaped  when  they  tried  passion.  Christabel,  the 
most  ambitious  if  also  the  most  unequal,  does  really  underlie  the 
criticism  that,  professing  itself  to  be  a  narrative  and  holding  out 
the  promise  of  something  like  a  connected  story,  it  tells  none,  and 
does  not  even  offer  very  distinct  hints  or  suggestions  of  what  its 
story,  if  it  had  ever  been  told,  might  have  been.  A  thousand 
faults  are  in  it ;  a  good  part  of  the  thousand  in  all  four. 

But  there  is  also  there  something  which  would  atone  for  faults 
ten  thousand  times  ten  thousand ;  there  is  what  one  hears  at  most 
three  or  four  times  in  English,  at  most  ten  or  twelve  times  in  all 
literature — the  first  note,  with  its  endless  echo-promise,  of  a  new 
poetry.  The  wonderful  cadence-changes  of  Knbla  Khan,  its 
phrases,  culminating  in  the  famous  distich  so  well  descriptive  of 
Coleridge  himself — 

For  he  on  honey  dew  hath  fed, 
And  drunk  the  milk  of  Paradise, 

the  splendid  crash  of  the 

Ancestral  voices  prophesying  war, 

are  all  part  of  this  note  and  cry.  You  will  find  them  nowhere 
from  Chaucer  to  Cowper — not  even  in  the  poets  where  you  will 
find  greater  things  as  you  may  please  to  call  them.  Then  in  the 
Mariner  come.?,  the  gorgeous  metre, — freed  at  once  and  for  the  first 
time  from  the  "  butter-woman's  rank  to  market "  which  had  dis- 
tinguished all  imitations  of  the  ballad  hitherto, — the  more  gorgeous 
imagery  and  pageantry  here,  the  simple  directness  there,  the 


E.Y' 


•SOUTHE  63 


tameless  range  of  imagination  and  fancy,  the  fierce  rush  of 
rhythm  :  — 

The  fair  breeze  blew,  the  white  foam  flew, 

The  furrow  followed  free  : 
We  were  the  first  that  ever  burst 

Into  that  silent  sea. 

And  thereafter  the  spectre  of  Life  -in  -Death,  the  water-  snakes, 
the  rising  of  the  dead  men,  the  snapping  of  the  spell.  There  had 
been  nothing  like  all  this  before;  and  in  all  the  hundred'  years, 
for  ^11  the  great  poetry  we  have  seen,  we  have  seen  nothing  so 
new  as  it.  Love  gave  the  magnificent  opening  stanza,  the  motto 
and  defence  at  once  of  the  largest,  the  most  genuine,  the  most 
delightful  part  of  poetry.  And  Christabel,  independently  of  its 
purple  patches,  such  as  the  famous  descant  on  the  quarrels  of 
friends,  and  the  portents  that  mark  the  passage  of  Geraldine,  gave 
what  was  far  more  important  —  a  new  metre,  destined  to  have  no 
less  great  and  much  more  copious  influence  than  the  Spenserian 
stanza  itself.  It  might  of  course  be  easy  to  pick  out  anticipations 
in  part  of  this  combination  of  iambic  dimeter,  trochaic,  and  ana- 
passtic  ;  but  it  never  had  taken  thorough  form  before.  And  how 
it  seized  on  the  imagination  of  those  who  heard  it  is  best  shown 
by  the  well-known  anecdote  of  Scott,  who,  merely  hearing  a  little 
of  it  recited,  at  once  developed  it  and  established  it  in  The  Lay 
of  the  Last  Minstrel.  In  verse  at  least,  if  not  in  prose,  there  is 
no  greater  master  than  Coleridge. 

Robert  Southey,  the  third  of  this  curiously  dissimilar  trio 
whom  partly  chance  and  partly  choice  have  bound  together  for  all 
time,  was  born  at  Bristol  on  iath  August  1774.  His  father  was 
only  a  linen-draper,  and  a  very  unprosperous  one  ;  but  the  Southeys 
were  a  respectable  family,  entitled  to  arms,  and  possessed  of  con- 
siderable landed  property  in  Somerset,  some  of  which  was  left 
away  from  the  poet  by  unfriendly  uncles  to  strangers,  while  more 
escaped  him  by  a  flaw  in  the  entail.  His  mother's  family,  the 
Hills,  were  in  much  better  circumstances  than  his  father,  and 
like  the  other  two  Lake  Poets  he  was  singularly  lucky  in  finding 


64  THE  NEW  POETRY 


helpers.  First  his  mother's  brother  the  Rev.  Herbert  Hill,  chap- 
lain to  the  English  factory  at  Lisbon,  sent  him  to  Westminster, 
where  he  did  very  well  and  made  invaluable  friends,  but  lost  the 
regular  advancement  to  Christ  Church  owing  to  the  wrath  of  the 
head-master  Dr.  Vincent  at  an  article  which  Southey  had  contri- 
buted to  a  school  magazine,  the  Flagellant.  He  was  in  fact 
expelled;  but  the  gravest  consequences  of  expulsion  from  a  public 
school  of  the  first  rank  did  not  fall  upon  him,  and  he  matricu- 
lated without  objection  at  Balliol  in  1793.  His  college,  however, 
which  was  then  distinguished  for  loose  living  and  intellectual 
dulness,  was  not  congenial  to  him ;  and  developing  extreme 
opinions  in  politics  and  religion,  he  decided  that  he  could  not 
take  orders,  and  left  without  even  taking  a  degree.  His  disgrace 
with  his  own  friends  was  completed  by  his  engaging  in  the  Pantiso- 
cratic  scheme  and  by  his  attachment  to  Edith  Fricker,  a  penniless 
girl  (though  not  at  all  a  "  milliner  at  Bath  ")  whose  sisters  became 
Mrs.  Coleridge  and  Mrs.  Lovell.  And  when  the  ever-charitable 
Hill  invited  him  to  Portugal  he  married  Miss  Fricker  the  very 
day  before  he  started.  After  a  residence  at  Lisbon,  in  which  he 
laid  the  foundation  of  his  unrivalled  acquaintance  with  Penin- 
sular history  and  literature,  he  returned  and  lived  with  his  wife 
at  various  places,  nominally  studying  for  the  law,  which  he  liked 
not  better  but  worse  than  the  Church.  After  divers  vicissitudes, 
including  a  fresh  visit  (this  time  not  as  a  bachelor)  to  Portugal, 
and  an  experience  of  official  work  as  secretary  to  Corry  the  Irish 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  he  at  last,  at  the  age  of  thirty,  estab- 
lished himself  at  Greta  Hall,  close  to  Keswick,  where  Coleridge 
had  already  taken  up  his  abode.  This,  as  well  as  much  else  in 
his  career,  was  made  possible  by  the  rare  generosity  of  his  friend 
of  school-days  and  all  days,  Charles  Wynn,  brother  of  the  then 
Sir  Watkin,  and  later  a  pretty  well  known  politician,  who  on 
coming  of  age  gave  him  an  annuity  of  ;£i6o  a  year.  This  in 
1807  he  relinquished  on  receiving  a  government  pension  of 
practically  the  same  amount.  The  Laureateship  in  1813  brought 
him  less  than  another  hundred ;  but  many  years  afterwards 


a  SOUTHEY  65 

Sir  Robert  Peel,  in  1835,  after  offering  a  baronetcy,  put  his 
declining  years  out  of  anxiety  by  conferring  a  further  pension  of 
^300  a  year  on  him.  These  declining  years  were  in  part  un- 
happy. As  early  as  1816  his  eldest  son  Herbert,  a  boy  of  great 
promise,  died ;  the  shock  was  repeated  some  years  later  by  the 
death  of  his  youngest  and  prettiest  daughter  Isabel ;  while  in  the 
same  year  as  that  in  which  his  pension  was  increased  his  wife 
became  insane,  and  died  two  years  later.  A  second  marriage  in 
1839  to  the  poetess  Caroline  Bowles  brought  him  some  com- 
fort ;  but  his  own  brain  became  more  and  more  affected,  and  for 
a  considerable  time  before  his  death  on  2ist  March  1843  he  had 
been  mentally  incapable. 

Many  morals  have  been  drawn  from  this  melancholy  end  as 
to  the  wisdom  of  too  prolonged  literary  labour,  which  in  Southey's 
case  had  certainly  been  prodigious,  and  had  been  carried  so  far 
that  he  actually  read  while  he  was  taking  constitutional  walks. 
It  is  fair  to  say,  however,  that,  just  as  in  the  case  of  Scott  the 
terrible  shock  of  the  downfall  of  his  fortunes  has  to  be  considered, 
so  in  that  of  Southey  the  successive  trials  to  which  he,  a  man 
of  exceptionally  strong  domestic  affections,  was  exposed,  must  be 
taken  into  account.  At  the  same  time  it  must  be  admitted  that 
Southey's  production  was  enormous.  His  complete  works  never 
have  been,  and  are  never  likely  to  be  collected ;  and,  from  the 
scattered  and  irregular  form  in  which  they  appeared,  it  is  difficult 
if  not  impossible  to  make  even  a  guess  at  the  total.  The  list  of 
books  and  articles  (the  latter  for  the  most  part  written  for  the 
Quarterly  Review,  and  of  very  great  length)  at  the  end  of  his 
son's  Life  fills  nearly  six  closely  printed  pages.  Two  of  these 
entries — the  Histories  of  Brazil  and  of  the  Peninsular  War — 
alone  represent  six  large  volumes.  The  Poems  by  themselves 
occupy  a  royal  octavo  in  double  columns  of  small  print  running 
to  eight  hundred  pages ;  the  correspondence,  very  closely  printed 
in  the  six  volumes  of  the  Life,  and  the  four  more  of  Letters  edited 
by  the  Rev.  J.  W.  Warter,  some  five  thousand  pages  in  all ;  while 
a  good  deal  of  his  early  periodical  work  has  never  been  identified, 

F 


66  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

and  there  are  large  stores  of  additional  letters  —  some  printed, 
more  in  MS.  Nor  was  Southey  by  any  means  a  careless  or  an 
easy  writer.  He  always  founded  his  work  on  immense  reading, 
some  of  the  results  of  which,  showing  the  laborious  fashion  in 
which  he  performed  it,  were  published  after  his  death  in  his 
Commonplace  Book.  He  did  not  write  very  rapidly ;  and  he 
corrected,  both  in  MS.  and  in  proof,  with  the  utmost  sedulity. 
Of  the  nearly  14,000  books  which  he  possessed  at  his  death,  it 
is  safe  to  say  that  all  had  been  methodically  read,  and  most 
read  many  times ;  while  his  almost  mediaeval  diligence  did 
not  hesitate  at  working  through  a  set  of  folios  to  obtain  the 
information  or  the  corrections  necessary  for  a  single  article. 

It  is  here  impossible  to  mention  more  than  the  chief  items  of 
this  portentous  list.  They  are  in  verse — Poems,  by  R.  Southey 
and  R.  Level  1,  1794;  Joan  of  Arc,  1795  ;  Minor  Poems,  1797-99  ; 
Thalaba,  1801  ;  Metrical  Tales  and  Madoc,  1805;  The  Curse  oj 
Keliama,  1810;  Roderick,  1814;  with  a  few  later  volumes,  the 
chief  being  the  unlucky  Vision  of  Judgment,  1821,  in  hexameters. 
A  complete  edition  of  the  Poems,  except  one  or  two  posthumously- 
printed,  was  published  by  himself  in  ten  volumes  in  1837,  and 
collected  into  one  ten  years  later  with  the  additions.  This  also 
includes  Wat  Tyler,  a  rhapsody  of  the  poet's  youth,  which  was 
(piratically  and  to  his  infinite  annoyance)  published  in  1817. 

In  prose  Southey's  most  important  works  are  the  History  of 
Brazil,  1810-19  (this,  large  as  it  is,  is  only  a  kind  of  offshoot 
of  the  projected  History  of  Portugal,  which  in  a  way  occupied  his 
whole  life,  and  never  got  published  at  all) ;  the  History  of  t?ic 
Peninsular  War,  1822-32  ;  the  Letters  from  England  by  Don 
Manuel  Espriella,  1812  ;  the  Life  of  Nelson  (usually  thought  his 
masterpiece),  1813;  the  Life  of  Wesley,  1820;  The  Book  of  the 
Church,  1824;  Colloquies  on  Society  (well  known,  if  not  in  itself,  for 
Macaulay's  review  of  it),  1829;  Naval  History,  1833-40:  and  the 
great  humorous  miscellany  of  The  Doctor  (seven  volumes),  1 834-47  ; 
to  which  must  be  added  editions,  containing  some  of  his  best  work, 
of  Chatterton,  Aniadis  of  (Jaitl,  Palmerin  of  England,  the  Morte 


SOUTHEY'S  POEMS  67 


d'' 'Arthur,  Kirke  White,  Bunyan,  and  Cowper,  with  divers  Specimens 
of  the  British  Poets,  the  charming  prose  and  verse  Chronicle  of 
the  Cid,  the  miscellany  of  Omniana,  half-way  between  table-  and 
commonplace-book,  the  Commonplace  Book  itself,  and  not  a  little 
else,  besides  letters  and  articles  innumerable. 

Certain  things  about  Southey  are  uncontested  and  uncontest- 
able.  The  uprightness  and  beauty  of  his  character,  his  wonderful 
helpfulness  to  others,  and  the  uncomplaining  way  in  which  he 
bore  what  was  almost  poverty — for,  high  as  was  his  reputation, 
his  receipts  were  never  a  tithe  of  the  rewards  not  merely  of  Scott 
or  Byron  or  Tom  Moore,  but  of  much  lesser  men — are  not  more 
generally  acknowledged  than  the  singular  and  pervading  excellence 
of  his  English  prose  style,  the  robustness  of  his  literary  genius, 
and  his  unique  devotion  to  literature.  But  when  we  leave  these 
accepted  things  he  becomes  more  difficult  if  not  less  interesting. 
He  himself  had  not  the  slightest  doubt  that  he  was  a  great  poet, 
and  would  be  recognised  as  such  by  posterity,  though  with  a 
proud  humility  he  reconciled  himself  to  temporary  lack  of  vogue. 
This  might  be  set  down  to  an  egotistic  delusion.  But  such  an 
easy  explanation  is  negatived  by  even  a  slight  comparison  of  the 
opinions  of  his  greatest  contemporaries.  It  is  somewhat  stagger- 
ing to  find  that  Scott,  the  greatest  Tory  man  of  letters  who  had 
strong  political  sympathies,  and  Fox,  the  greatest  Whig  politician 
who  had  keen  literary  tastes,  enjoyed  his  long  poems  enthusiastic- 
ally. But  it  may  be  said  that  the  eighteenth  century  leaven  which 
was  so  strong  in  each,  and  which  is  also  noticeable  in  Southey, 
conciliated  them.  What  then  are  we  to  say  of  Macaulay,  a  much 
younger  man,  a  violent  political  opponent  of  Southey,  and  a  by 
no  means  indiscriminate  lover  of  verse,  who,  admitting  that  he 
doubted  whether  Southey's  long  poems  would  be  read  after  half  a 
century,  had  no  doubt  that  if  read  they  would  be  admired  ?  And 
what  are  we  to  say  of  the  avowals  of  admiration  wrung  as  it  were 
from  Byron,  who  succeeded  in  working  himself  up,  from  personal, 
political,  and  literary  motives  combined,  into  a  frantic  hatred  of 
Southey,  lampooned  him  in  print,  sent  him  a  challenge  (which 


68  THE  NEW  POETRY 


luckily  was  not  delivered)  in  private,  and  was  what  the  late  Mr. 
Mark  Pattison  would  have  called  "  his  Satan  "  ? 

The  half  century  of  Macaulay's  prophecy  has  come,  and  that 
prophecy  has  been  fulfilled  as  to  the  rarity  of  Southey's  readers 
as  a  poet.  Has  the  other  part  come  true  too  ?  I  should  hesitate 
to  say  that  it  has.  Esteem  not  merely  for  the  man  but  for  the  writer 
can  never  fail  Southey  whenever  he  is  read  by  competent  persons  : 
admiration  may  be  less  prompt  to  come  at  call.  Two  among  his 
smaller  pieces — the  beautiful  "  Holly  Tree,"  and  the  much  later 
but  exquisite  stanzas  "  My  days  among  the  dead  are  past " — can 
never  be  in  any  danger ;  the  grasp  of  the  grotesque-terrific,  which 
the  poet  shows  in  the  "  Old  Woman  of  Berkley  "  and  a  great  many 
other  places,  anticipates  the  Ingoldsby  Legends  with  equal  ease  but 
with  a  finer  literary  gift ;  some  other  things  are  really  admirable 
and  not  a  little  pleasing.  But  the  longer  poems,  if  they  are  ever  to 
live,  are  still  dry  bones.  Thalaba,  one  of  the  best,  is  spoilt  by  the 
dogged  craze  against  rhyme,  which  is  more,  not  less,  needed  in 
irregular  than  in  regular  verse.  Joan  of  Arc,  Madoc,  Roderick, 
have  not  escaped  that  curse  of  blank  verse  which  only  Milton, 
and  he  not  always,  has  conquered  in  really  long  poems.  Kehama, 
the  only  great  poem  in  which  the  poet  no  longer  disdains  the 
almost  indispensable  aid  to  poetry  in  our  modern  and  loosely 
quantified  tongue,  is  much  better  than  any  of  the  others.  The 
Curse  itself  is  about  as  good  as  it  can  be,  and  many  other  passages 
are  not  far  below  it ;  but  to  the  general  taste  the  piece  suffers  from 
the  remote  character  of  the  subject,  which  is  not  generally  and 
humanly  interesting,  and  from  the  mass  of  tedious  detail. 

To  get  out  of  the  difficulty  thus  presented  by  indulging  in 
contemptuous  ignoring  of  Southey's  merits  has  been  attempted 
many  times  since  Emerson  foolishly  asked  "Who  is  Southey?" 
in  his  jottings  of  his  conversation  with  Landor,  Southey's  most 
dissimilar  but  constant  friend  and  panegyrist.  It  is  extremely 
easy  to  say  who  Southey  is.  He  is  the  possessor  of  perhaps  the 
purest  and  most  perfect  English  prose  style,  of  a  kind  at  once 
simple  and  scholarly,  to  be  found  in  the  language.  He  has  written 


II  SCOTT  69 

(in  the  Life  of  Nelson)  perhaps  the  best  short  biography  in  that 
language,  and  other  things  not  far  behind  this.  No  Englishman 
has  ever  excelled  him  in  range  of  reading,  or  in  intelligent  com- 
prehension and  memory  of  what  he  read.  Unlike  many  book- 
worms, he  had  an  exceedingly  lively  and  active  humour.  He  has 
scarcely  an  equal,  and  certainly  no  superior,  in  the  rare  and 
difficult  art  of  discerning  and  ranging  the  material  parts  of  an 
historical  account :  the  pedant  may  glean,  but  the  true  historian 
will  rarely  reap  after  him.  And  in  poetry  his  gifts,  if  they  are 
never  of  the  very  highest,  are  so  various  and  often  so  high  that  it 
is  absolutely  absurd  to  pooh-pooh  him  as  a  poet.  The  man  who 
could  write  the  verses  "  In  my  Library "  and  the  best  parts  of 
Thalaba  and  Kehama-,  certainly  had  it  in  his  power  to  write  other 
things  as  good,  probably  to  write  other  things  better.  Had  it 
been  in  his  nature  to  take  no  thought  not  merely  for  the  morrow 
but  even  for  the  day,  like  Coleridge,  or  in  his  fate  to  be  provided 
for  without  any  trouble  on  his  own  part,  and  to  take  the  provision 
with  self-centred  indifference,  like  Wordsworth,  his  actual  produc- 
tion might  have  been  different  and  better.  But  his  strenuous  and 
generous  nature  could  not  be  idle;  and  idleness  of  some  sort  is, 
it  may  be  very  seriously  laid  down,  absolutely  necessary  to  the 
poet  who  is  to  be  supreme. 

The  poet  who,  though,  according  to  the  canons  of  poetical 
criticism  most  in  favour  during  this  century,  he  ranks  lower  than 
either  Wordsworth  or  Coleridge,  did  far  more  to  popularise  the 
general  theory  of  Romantic  poetry  than  either,  was  a  slightly  older 
man  than  two  of  the  trio  just  noticed ;  but  he  did  not  begin  his 
poetical  career  (save  by  one  volume  of  translation)  till  some  years 
after  all  of  them  had  published.  Walter  Scott  was  born  in 
Edinburgh  on  the  i5th  of  August  1771.  His  father,  of  the  same 
name  as  himself,  was  a  Writer  to  the  Signet;  his  mother  was 
Anne  Rutherford,  and  the  future  poet  and  novelist  had  much 
excellent  Border  blood  in  him,  besides  that  of  his  direct  ancestors 
the  Scotts  of  Harden.  He  was  a  very  sickly  child  ;  and  though 
he  grew  out  of  this  he  was  permanently  lame.  His  early  childhood 


70  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

was  principally  spent  on  the  Border  itself,  with  a  considerable 
interval  at  Bath ;  and  he  was  duly  sent  to  the  High  School  and 
University  of  Edinburgh,  where,  like  a  good  many  other  future 
men  of  letters,  he  was  not  extremely  remarkable  for  what  is  called 
scholarship.  He  was  early  imprisoned  in  his  father's  office,  where 
the  state  of  relations  between  father  and  son  is  supposed  to  be 
pretty  accurately  represented  by  the  story  of  those  between  Alan 
Fairford  and  his  father  in  Redgauntlct ;  and,  like  Alan,  he  was 
called  to  the  bar.  But  even  in  the  inferior  branch  of  the  profession 
he  enjoyed  tolerable  liberty  of  wandering  about  and  sporting, 
besides  sometimes  making  expeditions  on  business  into  the 
Highlands  and  other  out-of-the-way  parts  of  the  country. 

He  thus  acquired  great  knowledge  of  his  fatherland ;  while 
(for  he  was,  if  not  exactly  a  scholar,  the  most  omnivorous  of 
readers)  he  was  also  acquiring  great  knowledge  of  books.  And  it 
ought  not  to  be  omitted  that  Edinburgh,  in  addition  to  the  literary 
and  professional  society  which  made  it  then  and  afterwards  so 
famous,  was  still  to  no  small  extent  the  headquarters  of  the  Scotch 
nobility,  and  that  Scott,  long  before  his  books  made  him  famous, 
was  familiar  with  society  of  every  rank.  His  first  love  affair  did 
not  run  smooth,  and  he  seems  never  to  have  entirely  forgotten  the 
object  of  it,  who  is  identified  (on  somewhat  more  solid  grounds 
than  in  the  case  of  other  novelists)  with  more  than  one  of  his 
heroines.  But  he  consoled  himself  to  a  certain  extent  with  a 
young  lady  half  French,  half  English,  Miss  Charlotte  Carpenter 
or  Charpentier,  whom  he  met  at  Gilsland  and  married  at  Carlisle 
on  Christmas  Eve  1797.  Scott  was  an  active  member  of  the 
yeomanry  as  well  as  a  barrister,  an  enthusiastic  student  of  German 
as  well  as  a  sportsman ;  and  the  book  of  translations  (from 
Burger)  above  referred  to  appeared  in  1796.  But  he  did  nothing 
important  till  after  the  beginning  of  the  present  century,  when  the 
starting  of  the  Edinburgh  Review  and  some  other  things  brought 
him  forward  ;  though  he  showed  what  lie  could  do  by  contributing 
two  ballads,  "Glenfinlas  "  and  "The  Eve  of  St.  John."  to  a  collec- 
tion of  terror-pieces  started  by  Monk  Lewis,  and  added  Goethe's 


II  SCOTT  71 

Gotz  von  Berlichingen  to  his  translations.  He  had  become  in 
1799  independent,  though  not  rich,  by  being  appointed  Sheriff  of 
Selkirkshire. 

His  beginnings  as  an  author  proper  were  connected,  as  was  all 
his  subsequent  career,  partly  for  good  but  more  for  ill,  with  a 
school  friendship  he  had  early  formed  for  two  brothers  named 
Ballantyne  at  Kelso.  He  induced  James,  the  elder,  to  start  a 
printing  business  at  Edinburgh,  and  unfortunately  he  entered  into 
a  secret  partnership  with  this  firm,  which  never  did  him  much 
good,  which  caused  him  infinite  trouble,  and  which  finally  ruined 
him.  But  into  this  complicated  and  still  much  debated  business 
it  is  impossible  to  enter  here.  James  Ballantyne  printed  the 
Border  Minstrelsy,  which  appeared  in  1802, — a  book  ranking 
with  Percy's  Reliques  in  its  influence  on  the  form  and  matter  of 
subsequent  poetry, — and  then  Scott  at  last  undertook  original 
work  of  magnitude.  His  task  was  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel, 
published  in  1805.  It  may  almost  be  said  that  from  that  day  to 
his  death  he  was  the  foremost — he  was  certainly,  with  the  exception 
of  Byron,  the  most  popular— man  of  letters  in  Great  Britain.  His 
next  poems — Marmion  (1808)  and  The  Lady  of  the  Lake  (1810) — 
brought  him  fame  and  money  such  as  no  English  poet  had  gained 
before ;  and  though  Byron's  following — for  following  it  was — for 
the  time  eclipsed  his  master,  the  latter's  Rokeby,  The  Lord  of  the 
files,  and  others,  would  have  been  triumphs  for  any  one  else. 

How,  when  the  taste  for  his  verse  seemed  to  cool,  he  struck 
out  a  new  line  in  prose  and  achieved  yet  more  fame  and  yet 
more  money  than  the  verse  had  ever  given  him,  will  concern  us 
in  the  next  chapter.  But  as  it  would  be  cumbrous  to  make  yet  a 
third  division  of  his  work,  the  part  of  his  prose  which  is  not 
fiction  may  be  included  here,  as  well  as  the  rest  of  his  life.  He 
had  written  much  criticism  for  the  Edinburgh,  until  he  was  partly 
disgusted  by  an  uncivil  review  of  Alarinton,  partly  (and  more)  by 
the  tone  of  increasing  Whiggery  and  non-intervention  which 
Jeffrey  was  imposing  on  the  paper ;  and  when  the  Quarterly  was 
founded  in  opposition  he  transferred  his  services  to  that.  He 


72  THE  NEW  1'OETRY 


edited  a  splendid  and  admirably  done  issue  of  Dryden  (i8o8y  and 
another  not  quite  so  thoroughly  executed  of  Swift  (1814),  and  his 
secret  connection  with  the  Ballantynes  induced  him  to  do  much 
other  editing  and  miscellaneous  work.  In  the  sad  last  years  of 
his  life  he  laboured  with  desperation  at  a  great  Life  of  Napoleon, 
which  was  a  success  pecuniarily  but  not  in  many  other  ways, 
produced  the  exquisite  Tales  of  a  Grandfather  on  Scottish  history, 
and  did  much  else.  He  even  wrote  plays,  which  have  very  little 
merit,  and,  except  abstract  philosophy,  there  is  hardly  a  division  of 
literature  that  he  did  not  touch  ;  for  he  composed  a  sermon  or 
two  of  merit,  and  his  political  pamphlets,  the  Letters  of  Malachi 
Matagrowther,  opposing  what  he  thought  an  interference  with 
Scottish  privileges  in  currency  matters,  are  among  the  best  of 
their  kind. 

His  life  was  for  many  years  a  very  happy  one;  for  his  marriage, 
if  not  passionately,  was  fairly  successful,  he  was  extremely  fond 
of  his  children,  and  while  his  poems  and  novels  began  before 
he  had  fully  reached  middle  life  to  make  him  a  rich  man,  his 
Sheriffship,  and  a  Clerkship  of  Session  which  was  afterwards  added 
(though  he  had  to  wait  some  time  for  its  emoluments),  had  already 
made  him  secure  of  bread  and  expectant  of  affluence.  From  a 
modest  cottage  at  Lasswade  he  expanded  himself  to  a  rented  country 
house  at  Ashestiel  on  the  Tweed,  having  besides  a  comfortable  town 
mansion  in  Edinburgh ;  and  when  he  was  turned  out  of  Ashestiel 
he  bought  land  and  began  to  build  at  Abbotsford  on  the  same 
river.  The  estate  was  an  ill-chosen  and  unprofitable  one.  The 
house  grew  with  the  owner's  fortunes,  which,  founded  in  part  as 
they  were  on  the  hardest  and  most  honest  work  that  author  ever 
gave,  were  in  part  also  founded  on  the  quicksand  of  his  treacherous 
connection  with  men,  reckless,  ill-judging,  and,  though  perhaps 
not  in  intention  dishonest,  perpetually  trading  on  their  secret 
partner's  industry  and  fame.  In  the  great  commercial  crash  of 
1825,  Constable,  the  publisher  of  most  of  the  novels,  was  involved; 
he  dragged  the  Ballantynes  down  with  him  ;  and  the  whole  of 
Scott's  fortune,  except  his  appointments  and  the  little  settled  on 


SCOTT'S  POEMS  73 


his  wife  and  children,  was  liable  for  the  Ballantynes'  debts.  But 
he  was  not  satisfied  with  ruin.  He  must  needs  set  to  work  at 
the  hopeless  task  of  paying  debts  which  he  had  never,  except 
technically,  incurred,  and  he  actually  in  the  remaining  years  of  his 
life  cleared  off  the  greater  part  of  them.  It  was  at  the  cost  of 
his  life  itself.  His  wife  died,  his  children  were  scattered ;  but  he 
worked  on  till  the  thankless,  hopeless  toil  broke  down  his  strength, 
and  after  a  fruitless  visit  to  Italy,  he  returned,  to  die  at  Abbotsford 
on  2ist  September  1832. 

Scott's  poetry  has  gone  through  various  stages  of  estimate,  and 
it  can  hardly  be  said  even  now,  a  hundred  years  after  the 
publication  of  his  first  verses,  to  have  attained  the  position,  prac- 
tically accepted  by  all  but  paradoxers,  which  in  that  time  a  poet 
usually  gains,  unless,  as  the  poets  of  the  seventeenth  century  did 
in  the  eighteenth,  he  falls,  owing  to  some  freak  of  popular  taste, 
out  of  really  critical  consideration  altogether.  The  immense 
popularity  which  it  at  first  obtained  has  been  noted,  as  well  as  the 
fact  that  it  was  only  ousted  from  that  popularity  by,  so  to  speak, 
a  variety  of  itself.  But  the  rise  of  Byron  in  the  long-run  did  it 
far  less  harm  than  the  long-delayed  vogue  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  and  the  success  even  of  the  later  schools,  of  which 
Tennyson  was  at  once  the  pioneer  and  the  commander-in-chief. 
At  an  uncertain  time  in  the  century,  but  comparatively  early,  it 
became  fashionable  to  take  Scott's  verse  as  clever  and  spirited 
improvisation,  to  dwell  on  its  over-fluency  and  facility,  its  lack  of 
passages  in  the  grand  style  (whatever  the  grand  style  may  be),  to 
indicate  its  frequent  blemishes  in  strictly  correct  form  and  phrase. 
And  it  can  hardly  be  said  that  there  has  been  much  reaction  from 
this  tone  among  professed  and  competent  critics. 

To  a  certain  extent,  indeed,  this  undervaluation  is  justified, 
and  Scott  himself,  who  was  more  free  from  literary  vanity  than 
any  man  of  letters  of  whom  we  have  record,  pleaded  guilty  again 
and  again.  Dropping  as  he  did  almost  by  accident  on  a  style 
which  had  absolutely  no  forerunners  in  elaborate  formal  literature, 
a  style  almost  absolutely  destitute  of  any  restrictions  or  limits,  in 


74  TIIK  NEW  POKTRY  CHAI-. 

which  the  length  of  lines  and  stanzas,  the  position  of  rhymes,  the 
change  from  narrative  to  dialogue,  and  so  forth,  depended  wholly 
and  solely  on  the  caprice  of  the  author,  it  would  have  been 
extremely  strange  if  a  man  whose  education  had  been  a  little 
lacking  in  scholastic  strictness,  and  who  began  to  write  at  a  time 
when  the  first  object  of  almost  every  writer  was  to  burst  old 
bonds,  had  not  been  somewhat  lawless,  even  somewhat  slipshod. 
Christabd  itself,  the  first  in  time,  and,  though  not  published  till 
long  afterwards,  the  model  of  his  Lay,  has  but  a  few  score  verses 
that  can  pretend  to  the  grand  Jtyle  (whatever  that  may  be). 
Nor  yet  again  can  it  be  denied  that,  acute  as  was  the  sense 
which  bade  Scott  stop,  he  wrote  as  it  was  a  little  too  much 
in  this  style,  while  he  tried  others  for  which  he  had  far  less 
aptitude. 

Yet  it  seems  to  me  impossible,  on  any  just  theory  of  poetry  or 
of  literature,  to  rank  him  low  as  a  poet.  He  can  afford  to  take 
his  trial  under  more  than  one  statute.  To  those  who  say  that  all 
depends  on  the  subject,  or  that  the  handling  and  arrangement  of 
the  subject  are,  if  not  everything,  yet  something  to  be  ranked  far 
above  mere  detached  beauties,  he  can  produce  not  merely  the 
first  long  narrative  poems  in  English,  which  for  more  than  a 
century  had  honestly  enthralled  and  fixed  popular  taste,  but  some 
of  the  very  few  long  narrative  poems  which  deserve  to  do  so. 
Wordsworth,  in  a  characteristic  note  on  the  U'hite  Doc  oj 
Rylstone,  contrasts,  with  oblique  depreciation  of  Scott,  that  poem 
and  its  famous  predecessors  in  the  style  across  the  border ;  but  he 
omits  to  notice  one  point  of  difference — that  in  Scott  the  storv 
interests,  and  in  himself  it  does  not.  For  the  belated  ''classical" 
criticism  of  the  Edinburgh  Revieiv,  which  thought  the  story  of 
the  Last  Minstrel  childish,  and  that  of  ^Farmion  not  much 
better,  it  may  have  been  at  least  consistent  to  undervalue  these 
poems.  But  the  assumptions  of  that  criticism  no  longer  pass 
muster.  On  the  other  hand,  to  those  who  pin  their  poetical 
faith  on  "patches,"  the  great  mass  of  Scott's  poetical  work 
presents  examples  of  certainly  no  common  beauty.  The  set 


ii  BYRON  75 

pieces  of  the  larger  poems,  the  Melrose  description  in  The 
Lay,  the  battle  in  Marmion,  the  Fiery  Cross  in  the  Lady  of  the 
Lake,  are  indeed  inferior  in  this  respect  to  the  mere  snatches 
which  the  author  scattered  about  his  novels,  some  of  which, 
especially  the  famous  "  Proud  Maisie,"  have  a  beauty  not  inferior 
to  that  of  the  best  things  of  his  greatest  contemporaries.  And  in 
swinging  and  dashing  lyric,  again,  Scott  can  hold  his  own  with 
the  best,  if  indeed  "  the  best "  can  hold  their  own  in  this  particular 
division  with  "  Lochinvar  "  and  "  Bonnie  Dundee,"  with  Elspeth's 
ballad  in  the  Antiquary,  and  the  White  Lady's  comfortable  words 
to  poor  Father  Philip. 

The  most  really  damaging  things  to  be  said  against  Scott  as  a 
poet  are  two.  First,  that  his  genius  did  not  incline  him  either  to 
the  expression  of  the  highest  passion  or  to  that  of  the  deepest 
meditation,  in  which  directions  the  utterances  of  the  very  greatest 
poetry  are  wont  to  lie.  In  the  second  place,  that  the  extreme 
fertility  and  fluency  which  cannot  be  said  to  have  improved  even 
his  prose  work  are,  from  the  nature  of  the  case,  far  more  evident, 
and  far  more  damagingly  evident,  in  his  verse.  He  is  a  poet  of 
description,  of  action,  of  narration,  rather  than  of  intense  feeling 
or  thought.  Yet  in  his  own  special  divisions  of  the  simpler  lyric 
and  of  lyrical  narrative  he  sometimes  attains  the  exquisite,  and 
rarely  sinks  below  a  quality  which  is  fitted  to  give  the  poetical 
delight  to  a  very  large  number  of  by  no  means  contemptible 
persons.  It  appears  to  me  at  least,  that  on  no  sound  theory  of 
poetical  criticism  can  Scott  be  ranked  as  a  poet  below  Byron,  who 
was  his  imitator  in  narrative  and  his  inferior  in  lyric.  But  it  may  be 
admitted  that  this  was  not  the  opinion  of  most  contemporaries  of 
the  two,  and  that,  much  as  the  poetry  of  Byron  has  sunk  in  critical 
estimation  during  the  last  half-century,  and  slight  as  are  the  signs 
of  its  recovery,  those  who  do  not  think  very  highly  of  the  poetry 
of  the  pupil  do  not,  as  a  rule,  show  much  greater  enthusiasm  for 
that  of  the  master. 

Byron,  it  is  true,  was  only  half  a  pupil  of  Scott's,  and  (oddly 
enough  for  the  poet,  who,  with  Scott,  was  recognised  as  leader  by 


76  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

the  Romantic  schools  of  all  Europe)  had  more  than  a  hankering 
after  the  classical  ideals  in  literature.  Yet  how  much  of  this  was 
due  to  wilful  "pose"  and  a  desire  not  to  follow  the  prevailing 
school  of  the  day  is  a  question  difficult  to  answer — as  indeed  are 
many  connected  with  Byron,  whose  utterances,  even  in  private 
letters,  are  very  seldom  to  be  taken  with  absolute  confidence 
in  their  sincerity.  The  poet's  character  did  no  discredit  to 
the  doctrines  of  heredity.  His  family  was  one  of  considerable 
distinction  and  great  age ;  but  his  father,  Captain  John  Byron, 
who  never  came  to  the  title,  was  a  roue  of  the  worst  character, 
and  the  cousin  whom  the  poet  succeeded  had  earned  the  name 
of  the  Wicked  Lord.  His  mother,  Catherine  Gordon  of  Gight, 
was  of  an  excellent  Scotch  stock,  and  an  heiress ;  though  her 
rascally  husband  made  away  with  her  money.  But  she  had  a 
most  violent  temper,  and  seems  to  have  had  absolutely  no  claims 
except  those  of  birth  to  the  title  of  lady.  Byron  was  born  in 
Holies  Street,  Cavendish  Square,  on  22nd  January  1788;  and  his 
early  youth,  which  was  spent  with  his  mother  at  Aberdeen,  was 
one  of  not  much  indulgence  or  happiness.  But  he  came  to  the 
title,  and  to  an  extremely  impoverished  succession,  at  ten  years 
old,  and  three  years  later  was  sent  to  Harrow.  Here  he  made 
many  friends,  distinguishing  himself  by  obtruding  mentions  and 
memories  of  his  rank  in  a  way  not  common  with  the  English 
aristocracy,  and  hence,  in  1805,  he  proceeded  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge.  He  spent  about  the  usual  time  there,  but 
took  no  degree,  and  while  he  was  still  an  undergraduate  printed 
his  Hours  of  Idleness,  first  called  Juvenilia,  It  appeared  publicly 
in  March  1807,  and  a  year  later  was  the  subject  of  a  criticism, 
rather  excessive  than  unjust,  in  the  Edinburgh  Kerieu1.  Byron, 
who  had  plenty  of  pluck,  and  who  all  his  life  long  inclined  in  his 
heart  to  the  Popian  school,  spent  a  considerable  time  upon  a 
verse-answer,  English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers,  in  which  he  ran 
amuck  generally,  but  displayed  ability  which  was  hopelessly  to 
seek  in  his  first  production.  Then  he  went  abroad,  arcl  the 
excitement  of  his  sojourn  in  the  countries  round  the  Meditei- 


II  BYRON  77 

ranean  for  the  next  two  years  not  only  aroused,  but  finally  deter- 
mined and  almost  fully  developed,  his  genius. 

On  his  return  home  he  took  his  seat  and  went  into  society 
with  the  success  likely  to  attend  an  extremely  handsome  young 
man  of  twenty-three,  with  a  vague  reputation  both  for  ability  and 
naughtiness,  a  fairly  old  title,  and  something  of  an  estate.  But 
his  position  as  a  "lion"  was  not  thoroughly  asserted  till  the 
publication,  in  February  1812,  of  Childe  Harold,  which  with 
some  difficulty  he  had  been  induced  by  his  friend  Dallas,  his 
publisher  Murray,  and  the  critic  Gifford  to  put  before  some  frigid 
and  trivial  Hints  from  Horace.  Over  Childe  Harold  the  English 
public  went  simply  mad,  buying  seven  editions  in  five  weeks  ;  and 
during  the  next  three  years  Byron  produced,  in  rapid  succession, 
The  Giaour,  The  Bride  of  Abydos,  The  Corsair,  Lara,  The  Siege 
of  Corinth,  and  Hebrew  Melodies.  He  could  hardly  write  fast 
enough  for  the  public  to  buy.  Then,  the  day  after  New  Year's 
Day  1814,  he  married  Miss  Milbanke,  a  great  heiress,  a  future 
baroness  in  her  own  right,  and  handsome  after  a  fashion,  but  of 
a  cold,  prim,  and  reserved  disposition,  as  well  as  of  a  very  un- 
forgiving temper.  It  probably  did  not  surprise  any  one  who  knew 
the  pair  when,  a  year  later,  they  separated  for  ever. 

The  scandals  and  discussions  connected  with  this  event  are 
fortunately  foreign  to  our  subject  here.  The  only  important  result 
of  the  matter  for  literature  is  that  Byron  (upon  whom  public 
opinion  in  one  of  its  sudden  fits  of  virtuous  versatility  threw  even 
more  of  the  blame  than  was  probably  just)  left  the  country  and 
journeyed  leisurely,  in  the  company  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Shelley  for 
the  most  part,  to  Venice.  He  never  returned  alive  to  England ; 
and  Venice,  Ravenna,  Pisa,  and  Genoa  were  successively  his  head 
quarters  till  1823.  Then  the  Greek  Insurrection  attracted  him, 
he  raised  what  money  he  could,  set  out  for  Greece,  showed  in  the 
distracted  counsels  of  the  insurgents  much  more  practical  and 
untheatrical  heroism  than  he  had  hitherto  been  credited  with,  and 
died  of  fever  at  Missolonghi  on  the  iQth  of  April  1824.  His 
body  was  brought  home  to  England  and  buried  in  the  parish 


78  THE  NEW  POETRY 


church  of  Hucknall  Torkard,  near  Newstead  Abbey,  his  Netting 
hamshire  seat,  which,  however,  he  had  sold  some  time  before. 
The  best  of  Byron's  poems  by  far  date  from  this  latter  period  of 
his  life :  the  later  cantos  of  Childe  Harold,  the  beautiful  short 
poems  of  The  Dream  and  Darkness,  many  pieces  in  dramatic 
form  (the  chief  of  which  are  Manfred,  Cain,  Marino  Faliero,  and 
Sardanapa/us),  Mazeppa,  a  piece  more  in  his  earlier  style  but 
greatly  superior  to  his  earlier  work,  a  short  burlesque  poem 
Beppo,  and  an  immense  and  at  his  death  unfinished  narrative 
satire  entitled  Don  Juan. 

Although  opinions  about  Byron  differ  very  much,  there  is  one 
point  about  him  which  does  not  admit  of  difference  of  opinion. 
No  English  poet,  perhaps  no  English  writer  except  Scott  (or 
rather  "  The  Author  of  Waverley "),  has  ever  equalled  him  in 
popularity  at  home  ;  and  no  English  writer,  with  Richardson  and 
Scott  again  as  seconds,  and  those  not  very  close  ones,  has 
equalled  him  in  contemporary  popularity  abroad.  The  vogue  of 
Byron  in  England,  though  overpowering  for  the  moment,  was  even 
at  its  height  resisted  by  some  good  judges  and  more  strait-laced 
moralists  ;  and  it  ebbed,  if  not  as  rapidly  as  it  flowed,  with  a  much 
more  enduring  movement.  But  abroad  he  simply  took  possession 
of  the  Continent  of  Europe  and  kept  it.  He  was  one  of  the 
dominant  influences  and  determining  causes  of  the  French 
Romantic  movement ;  in  Germany,  though  the  failure  of  literary 
talent  and  activity  of  the  first  order  in  that  country  earl)  in  this 
century  made  his  school  less  important,  he  had  great  power  over 
Heine,  its  one  towering  genius  ;  and  he  was  almost  the  sole 
master  of  young  Russia,  young  Italy,  young  Spain,  in  poetry. 
Nor,  though  his  active  and  direct  influence  has  of  course  been 
exhausted  by  time,  ran  his  reputation  on  the  Continent  be  said 
to  have  ever  waned. 

These  various  facts,  besides  being  certain  in  themselves, 
are  also  very  valuable  as  guiding  the  inquirer  in  regions  which 
are  more  of  opinion.  The  rapidity  of  Byron's  success  everywhere, 
the  extent  of  it  abroad  (where  few  English  writers  before  him  had 


II  BYRON'S  POEMS  79 


had  any  at  all),  and  the  decline  at  home,  are  all  easily  connected 
with  certain  peculiarities  of  his  work.  That  work  is  almost  as 
fluent  and  facile  as  Scott's,  to  which,  as  has  been  said,  it  owes 
immense  debts  of  scheme  and  manner ;  and  it  is  quite  as  faulty. 
Indeed  Scott,  with  all  his  indifference  to  a  strictly  academic 
correctness,  never  permitted  himself  the  bad  rhymes,  the  bad 
grammar,  the  slip-shod  phrase  in  which  Byron  unblushingly 
indulges.  But  Byron  is  much  more  monotonous  than  Scott,  and 
it  was  this  very  monotony,  assisted  by  an  appearance  of  intensity, 
which  for  the  time  gave  him  power.  The  appeal  of  Byron  consists 
very  mainly,  though  no  doubt  not  wholly,  in  two  things  :  the  lavish 
use  of  the  foreign  and  then  unfamiliar  scenery,  vocabulary,  and 
manners  of  the  Levant,  and  the  installation,  as  principal  character, 
of  a  personage  who  was  speedily  recognised  as  a  sort  of  fancy 
portrait,  a  sketch  in  cap  and  yataghan,  of  Byron  himself  as  he 
would  like  to  be  thought.  This  Byronic  hero  has  an  ostentatious 
indifference  to  moral  laws,  for  the  most  part  a  mysterious  past 
which  inspires  him  with  deep  melancholy,  great  personal  beauty, 
strength,  and  bravery,  and  he  is  an  all-conquering  lover.  He  is 
not  quite  so  original  as  he  seemed,  for  he  is  in  effect  very  little 
more  than  the  older  Romantic  villain-hero  of  Mrs.  Radcliffe,  the 
Germans,  and  Monk  Lewis,  costumed  much  more  effectively, 
placed  in  scheme  and  companionship  more  picturesquely,  and 
managed  with  infinitely  greater  genius.  But  it  is  a  common  ex- 
perience in  literary  history  that  a  type  more  or  less  familiar 
already,  and  presented  with  striking  additions,  is  likely  to  be 
more  popular  than  something  absolutely  new.  And  accordingly 
Byron's  bastard  and  second-hand  Romanticism,  though  it  owed 
a  great  deal  to  the  terrorists  and  a  great  deal  more  to  Scott,  for 
the  moment  altogether  eclipsed  the  pure  and  original  Romanticism 
of  his  elders  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  of  his  juniors  Shelley 
and  Keats. 

But  although  the  more  extreme  admirers  of  Byron  would  no 
doubt  dissent  strongly  from  even  this  judgment,  it  would  probably 
be  subscribed,  with  some  reservations  and  guards,  by  not  a  few 


80  TIIK  NEW  POETRY 


good  critics  from  whom  I  am  compelled  to  part  company  as  to 
other  parts  of  Byron's  poetical  claim.  It  is  on  the  question  how 
much  of  true  poetry  lies  behind  and  independent  of  the  scenery 
and  properties  of  Byronism,  that  the  great  debate  arises.  Was 
the  author  of  the  poems  from  Childe  Harold  to  Don  Juan  really 
gifted  with  the  poetical  "sincerity  and  strength  "  which  have  been 
awarded  him  by  a  critic  of  leanings  so  little  Byronic  in  the  ordinary- 
sense  as  Matthew  Arnold  ?  Is  he  a  poetic  star  of  the  first  magni- 
tude, a  poetic  force  of  the  first  power,  at  all  ?  There  may  seem  to 
be  rashness,  there  may  even  seem  to  be  puerile  insolence  and 
absurdity,  in  denying  or  even  doubting  this  in  the  face  of  such  a 
European  concert  as  has  been  described  and  admitted  above. 
Yet  the  critical  conscience  admits  of  no  transaction  ;  and  after  all, 
as  it  was  doubted  by  a  great  thinker  whether  nations  might  not 
go  mad  like  individuals,  I  do  not  know  why  it  should  be  regarded 
as  impossible  that  continents  should  go  mad  like  nations. 

At  any  rate  the  qualities  of  Byron  are  very  much  of  a  piece, 
and,  even  by  the  contention  of  his  warmest  reasonable  admirers, 
not  much  varied  or  very  subtle,  not  necessitating  much  analysis 
or  disquisition.  They  can  be  fairly  pronounced  upon  in  a  judg- 
ment of  few  words.  Byron,  then,  seems  to  me  a  poet  distinctly  of 
the  second  class,  and  not  even  of  the  best  kind  of  second,  inasmuch 
as  his  greatness  is  chiefly  derived  from  a  sort  of  parody,  a  sort  of 
imitation,  of  the  qualities  of  the  first.  His  verse  is  to  the  greatest 
poetry  what  melodrama  is  to  tragedy,  what  plaster  is  to  marble, 
what  pinchbeck  is  to  gold.  He  is  not  indeed  an  impostor  ;  for 
his  sense  of  the  beauty  of  nature  and  of  the  unsatisfactoriness  of 
life  is  real,  and  his  power  of  conveying  this  sense  to  others  is  real 
also.  He  has  great,  though  uncertain,  and  never  very  Jint\ 
command  of  poetic  sound,  and  a  considerable  though  less 
command  of  poetic  vision.  But  in  all  this  there  is  a  singular 
touch  of  illusion,  of  what  his  contemporaries  had  learnt  from  Scott 
to  call  gramarye.  The  often  cited  parallel  of  the  false  and  true 
Florimels  in  Spenser  applies  here  also.  The  really  great  poets  do 
not  injure  each  other  in  the  very  least  by  comparison,  different  as 


il  SHELLEY  81 

they  are.  Milton  does  not  "kill"  Wordsworth;  Spenser  does  not 
injure  Shelley ;  there  is  no  danger  in  reading  Keats  immediately 
after  Coleridge.  But  read  Byron  in  close  juxtaposition  with  any 
of  these,  or  with  not  a  few  others,  and  the  effect,  to  any  good 
poetic  taste,  must  surely  be  disastrous  ;  to  my  own,  whether  good 
or  bad,  it  is  perfectly  fatal.  The  light  is  not  that  which  never  was 
on  land  or  sea ;  it  is  that  which  is  habitually  just  in  front  of  the 
stage  :  the  roses  are  rouged,  the  cries  of  passion  even  sometimes 
(not  always)  ring  false.  I  have  read  Byron  again  and  again ;  I 
have  sometimes,  by  reading  Byron  only  and  putting  a  strong  con- 
straint upon  myself,  got  nearly  into  the  mood  to  enjoy  him.  But 
let  eye  or  ear  once  catch  sight  or  sound  of  real  poetry,  and  the 
enchantment  vanishes. 

Attention  has  already  been  called  to  the  fact  that  Byron, 
though  generally  ranking  with  the  poets  who  have  been  placed 
before  him  in  this  chapter  as  a  leader  in  the  nineteenth  century 
renaissance  of  poetry,  was  a  direct  scholar  of  Scott,  and  in  point 
of  age  represented,  if  not  a  new  generation,  a  second  division  of 
the  old.  This  was  still  more  the  case  in  point  of  age,  and  almost 
infinitely  more  so  in  point  of  quality,  as  regards  Shelley  and  Keats. 
There  was  nothing  really  new  in  Byron ;  there  was  only  a  great 
personal  force  directing  itself,  half  involuntarily  and  more  than 
half  because  of  personal  lack  of  initiative,  into  contemporary  ways. 
The  other  two  poets  just  mentioned  were  really  new  powers. 
They  took  some  colour  from  their  elders  ;  but  they  added  more 
than  they  took,  and  they  would  unquestionably  have  been  great 
figures  at  any  time  of  English  literature  and  history.  Scott  had 
little  or  no  influence  on  them,  and  Wordsworth  not  much ;  but 
they  were  rather  close  to  Coleridge,  and  they  owed  something  to  a 
poet  of  much  less  genius  than  his  or  than  their  own — Leigh 
Hunt. 

Percy  Bysshe  Shelley,  the  elder  of  the  two,  was  Byron's  junior 
by  four  years,  and  was  bom  at  Field  Place  in  Sussex  on  August 
1792.  He  was  the  heir  of  a  very  respectable  and  ancient 
though  not  very  distinguished  family  of  the  squirearchy  ;  and  he 


82  THI.  NKW  POETRY 


had  every  advantage  of  education,  being  sent  to  Eton  in  1804, 
and  to  University  College,  Oxford,  six  years  later.  The  un- 
conquerable unconventionality  of  his  character  and  his  literary 
tastes  had  shown  themselves  while  he  was  still  a  schoolboy,  and 
in  the  last  year  of  his  Etonian  and  the  first  of  his  Oxonian 
residence  he  published  two  of  the  most  absurd  novels  of  the 
most  absurd  novel  kind  that  ever  appeared,  Zastrozzi  and  St. 
Irryne,  imitations  of  Monk  Lewis.  He  also  in  the  same  year 
collaborated  in  two  volumes  of  verse,  The  Wandering  Jew  (partly 
represented  by  Queen  Mab\  and  "  Poems  by  Victor  and  Cazire  " 
(which  long  vindicated  the  existence  of  reviewers  by  surviving 
only  in  its  reviews,  but  has  now  been  recovered).  His  stay  at 
Oxford  was  not  long ;  for  having,  in  conjunction  with  a  clever 
but  rather  worthless  friend,  Thomas  Jefferson  Hogg  (afterwards 
his  biographer),  issued  a  pamphlet  on  "The  Necessity  of 
Atheism  "  and  sent  it  to  the  heads  of  colleges,  he  was,  by  a  much 
greater  necessity,  expelled  from  University  on  25th  March  1811. 
Later  in  the  same  year  he  married  Harriet  Westbrook,  a  pretty 
and  lively  girl  of  sixteen,  who  had  been  a  school-fellow  of  his 
sister's,  but  came  from  the  lower  middle  class.  His  apologists 
have  said  that  Harriet  threw  herself  at  his  head,  and  that  Shelley 
explained  to  her  that  she  or  he  might  depart  when  either  pleased. 
The  responsibility  and  the  validity  of  this  defence  may  be  left  to 
these  advocates. 

For  nearly  three  years  Shelley  and  his  wife  led  an  exceedingly 
wandering  life  in  Ireland,  Wales,  Devonshire,  Berkshire,  the  Lake 
1  )istrict,  and  elsewhere,  Shelley  attempting  all  sorts  of  eccentric  pro- 
pagandism  in  politics  and  religion,  and  completing  the  crude  but 
absolutely  original  Queen  Mab.  Hefore  the  third  anniversary  of  his 
wedding  day  came  round  he  had  parted  with  Harriet,  against 
whose  character  his  apologists,  as  above,  have  attempted  to 
bring  charges.  The  fact  is  that  he  had  fallen  in  love  with  Mary 
(iodwin,  daughter  of  the  author  of  Political  Justice  (whose  writings 
had  always  had  a  great  influence  on  Shelley,  and  who  spunged  on 
him  pitilessly)  and  of  Mary  Wollstoneeraft.  The  pair  fled  to 


II  SHELLEY  83 

the  Continent  together  in  July  1814;  and  two  years  later,  when 
the  unhappy  wife,  a  girl  of  twenty-one,  had  drowned  herself  in  the 
Serpentine,  they  were  married.  Meanwhile  Shelley  had  wandered 
back  to  England,  had,  owing  to  the  death  of  his  grandfather, 
received  a  considerable  independent  income  by  arrangement,  and 
in  1815  had  written  Alastor,  which,  though  not  so  clearly  indica- 
tive of  a  new  departure  when  compared  with  Queen  Mab  as  some 
critics  have  tried  to  make  out,  no  other  living  poet,  perhaps  no 
other  poet,  could  have  written.  He  was  refused  the  guardianship, 
though  he  was  allowed  to  appoint  guardians,  of  his  children  by 
the  luckless  Harriet,  and  was  (for  him  naturally,  though  for  most 
men  unreasonably)  indignant.  But  his  poetical  vocation  and 
course  were  both  clear  henceforward,  though  he  never  during  his 
life  had  much  command  of  the  public,  and  had  frequent  difficul- 
ties with  publishers,  while  the  then  attitude  of  the  law  made  piracy 
very  easy.  For  a  time  he  lived  at  Marlow,  where  he  wrote  or 
began  Prince  Athanase,  Rosalind  and  Helen,  and  above  all  Laon 
and  Cythna,  called  later  and  permanently  The  Revolt  of  Islam. 
In  April  1818  he  left  England  for  Italy,  and  never  returned. 

The  short  remains  of  his  life  were  spent  chiefly  at  Lucca, 
Florence,  and  Pisa,  with  visits  to  most  of  the  other  chief  Italian 
cities ;  Byron  being  often,  and  Leigh  Hunt  at  the  last,  his  com- 
panion. All  his  greatest  poems  were  now  written.  At  last,  in 
July  1821,  when  the  Shelleys  were  staying  at  a  lonely  house  named 
Casa  Magni,  on  the  Bay  of  Spezia,  he  and  his  friend  Lieutenant 
Williams  set  out  in  a  boat  from  Leghorn.  The  boat  either 
foundered  in  a  squall  or  was  run  down.  At  any  rate  Shelley's 
body  was  washed  ashore  on  the  igth,  and  burnt  on  a  pyre  in  the 
presence  of  Byron,  Hunt,  and  Trelawny. 

Little  need  be  said  of  Shelley's  character.  If  it  had  not  been 
for  the  disgusting  efforts  of  his  maladroit  adorers  to  blacken 
that  not  merely  of  his  hapless  young  wife,  but  of  every  one  with 
whom  he  came  in  contact,  it  might  be  treated  with  the  extremest 
indulgence.  Almost  a  boy  in  years  at  the  time  of  his  death,  he 
was,  with  some  late  flashes  of  sobering,  wholly  a  boy  in  inability 


84  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

to  understand  the  responsibilities  and  the  burdens  of  life.  An 
enthusiast  for  humanity  generally,  and  towards  individuals  a  man 
of  infinite  generosity  and  kindliness,  he  yet  did  some  of  the 
cruellest  and  some  of  not  the  least  disgraceful  things  from  mere 
childish  want  01  realising  the  pacta  conventa  of  the  world.  He, 
wholly  ignorant,  would,  if  he  could,  have  turned  the  wheel  of 
society  the  other  way,  reckless  of  the  horrible  confusion  and 
suffering  that  he  must  occasion. 

But  in  pure  literary  estimation  we  need  take  no  note  of  this. 
In  literature,  Shelley,  if  not  of  the  first  three  or  four,  is  certainly 
of  the  first  ten  or  twelve.  He  has,  as  no  poet  in  England  except 
Blake,  in  a  few  flashes,  and  Coleridge  had  had  before  him  for  some 
century  and  a  half,  the  ineffable,  the  divine  intoxication  which  only 
the  di  majores  of  poetry  can  communicate  to  their  worshippers. 
Once  again,  after  all  these  generations,  it  became  unnecessary  to 
agree  or  disagree  with  the  substance,  to  take  interest  or  not  to 
take  interest  in  it,  to  admit  or  to  contest  the  presence  of  faults 
and  blemishes — to  do  anything  except  recognise  and  submit  to 
the  strong  pleasure  of  poetry,  the  charm  of  the  highest  poetical 
inspiration. 

I  think  myself,  though  the  opinion  is  not  common  among 
critics,  that  this  touch  is  unmistakable  even  so  early  as  Queen 
Mab.  That  poem  is  no  doubt  to  a  certain  extent  modelled  upon 
Southey.  especially  upon  Kehawa,  much  more  than  on  Thalaba, 
despite  the  superficial  resemblance  of  rhymelessness.  But  the 
motive  was  different :  the  sails  might  be  the  same,  but  the  wind 
that  impelled  them  was  another.  By  the  time  of  Alastor  it  is 
generally  admitted  that  there  could  or  should  have  been  little 
mistake.  Nothing,  indeed,  but  the  deafening  blare  of  Byron's 
brazen  trumpet  could  have  silenced  this  music  of  the  spheres. 
The  meaning  is  not  very  much,  though  it  is  passable ;  but  the 
music  is  exquisite.  There  is  just  a  foundation  of  Wordsworthian 
scheme  in  the  blank  verse ;  but  the  structure  built  on  it  is  not 
Wordsworth's  at  all,  and  there  are  merely  a  few  borrowed  strokes 
of  technique,  such  as  the  placing  of  a  long  adjective  before  a 


II  SHELLEY  85 

monosyllabic  noun  at  the  end  of  the  line,  and  a  strong  caesura 
about  two-thirds  through  that  line.  All  the  rest  is  Shelley,  and 
wonderful. 

It  may  be  questioned  whether,  fine  as  The  Revolt  of  Islam 
is,  the  Spenserian  stanza  was  quite  so  well  suited  as  the 
"  Pindaric  "  or  as  blank  verse,  or  as  lyrical  measures,  to  Shelley's 
genius.  It  is  certainly  far  excelled  both  in  the  lyrics  and  in  the 
blank  verse  of  Prometheus  Unbound,  the  first  poem  which  dis- 
tinctly showed  that  one  of  the  greatest  lyric  poets  of  the  world 
had  been  born  to  England.  The  Cenri  relies  more  on  subject, 
and,  abandoning  the  lyric  appeal,  abandons  what  Shelley  is 
strongest  in  ;  but  Hellas  restores  this.  Of  his  comic  efforts, 
the  chief  of  which  are  Swellfoot  the  Tyrant  and  Peter  Bell  the 
Third,  it  is  perhaps  enough  to  say  that  his  humour,  though  it 
existed,  was  fitful,  and  that  he  was  too  much  of  a  partisan  to 
keep  sufficiently  above  his  theme.  The  poems  midway  between, 
large  and  small  —  Prince  Athanase,  The  Witch  of  Atlas  (an 
exquisite  and  glorious  fantasy  piece),  Rosalind  and  Helen, 
Adonais,  Epipsychidion,  and  the  Triumph  of  Life — would  alone 
have  made  his  fame.  But  it  is  in  Shelley's  smallest  poems  that 
his  greatest  virtue  lies.  Not  even  in  the  seventeenth  century  had 
any  writer  given  so  much  that  was  so  purely  exquisite.  "To 
Constantia  Singing,"  the  "Ozymandias"  sonnet,  the  "Lines 
written  among  the  Euganean  Hills,"  the  "  Stanzas  written  in 
Dejection,"  the  "  Ode  to  the  West  Wind,"  the  hackneyed  "  Cloud," 
and  "Skylark,"  "Arethusa,"  the  "World's  Wanderers,"  "Music, 
when  soft  voices  die,"  "The  flower  that  smiles  to-day,"  "Rarely, 
rarely,  comest  thou,"  the  "  Lament,"  "  One  word  is  too  often 
profaned,"  the  "  Indian  Air,"  the  second  "  Lament,"  "  O  world  ! 
O  life  !  O  time !  "  (the  most  perfect  thing  of  its  kind  perhaps, 
in  the  strict  sense  of  perfection,  that  all  poetry  contains),  the 
"  Invitation,"  and  the  "  Recollection," — this  long  list,  which  might 
have  been  made  longer,  contains  things  absolutely  consummate, 
absolutely  unsurpassed,  only  rivalled  by  a  few  other  things  a* 
perfect  as  themselves. 


86  THE  NEW  POETRY 


Shelley  has  been  foolishly  praised,  and  it  is  very  likely  that 
the  praise  given  here  may  seem  to  some  foolish.  It  is  as  hard 
for  praise  to  keep  the  law  of  the  head  as  for  blame  to  keep  the 
law  of  the  heart.  He  has  been  mischievously  and  tastelessly 
excused  for  errors  both  in  and  out  of  his  writings  which  need 
only  a  kindly  silence.  In  irritation  at  the  "chatter"  over  him 
some  have  even  tried  to  make  out  that  his  prose — very  fine 
prose  indeed,  and  preserved  to  us  in  some  welcome  letters  and 
miscellaneous  treatises,  but  capable  of  being  dispensed  with — is 
more  worthy  of  attention  than  his  verse,  which  has  no  parallel 
and  few  peers.  But  that  one  thing  will  remain  true  in  the 
general  estimate  of  competent  posterity  I  have  no  doubt.  There 
are  two  English  poets,  and  two  only,  in  whom  the  purely  poetical 
attraction,  exclusive  of  and  sufficient  without  all  others,  is  supreme, 
and  these  two  are  Spenser  and  Shelley. 

The  life  of  John  Keats  was  even  shorter  and  even  less  marked 
by  striking  events  than  that  of  Shelley,  and  he  belonged  in  point 
of  extraction  and  education  to  a  somewhat  lower  class  of  society 
than  any  of  the  poets  hitherto  mentioned  in  this  chapter.  He 
was  the  son  of  a  livery  stable  keeper  who  was  fairly  well  off,  and  he 
went  to  no  school  but  a  private  one,  where,  however,  he  received 
tolerable  instruction  and  had  good  comrades.  Born  in  1795, 
he  was  apprenticed  to  a  surgeon  at  the  age  of  fifteen,  and  even 
did  some  work  in  his  profession,  till  in  1817  his  overmastering 
passion  for  literature  had  its  way.  He  became  intimate  with  the 
so-called  "  Cockney  school/'  or  rather  with  its  leaders  Leigh 
Hunt  and  Hazlitt — an  intimacy,  as  far  as  the  former  was  con- 
cerned, not  likely  to  chasten  his  own  taste,  but  chiefly  un- 
fortunate because  it  led,  in  the  rancorous  state  of  criticism  then 
existing,  to  his  own  efforts  being  branded  with  the  same  epithet. 
His  first  book  was  published  in  the  year  above  mentioned  :  it 
did  not  contain  all  the  verse  he  had  written  up  to  that  time,  or 
the  best  of  it,  but  it  confirmed  him  in  his  vocation.  He  broke 
away  from  surgery,  and,  having  some  little  means,  travelled  to  the 
Isle  of  Wight,  Devonshire,  and  other  parts  of  England,  besides 


n  KEATS  87 

becoming  more  and  more  familiar  with  men  of  letters.  It  was  in 
the  Isle  of  Wight  that  he  at  least  began  Endymion,  which  appeared 
in  1818.  This  was  savagely  and  stupidly  attacked  in  Black- 
wood  and  the  Quarterly  •  the  former  article  being  by  some  attri- 
buted, without  a  tittle  of  evidence,  to  Lockhart.  But  the  supposed 
effect  of  these  attacks  on  Keats's  health  was  wildly  exaggerated 
by  some  contemporaries,  especially  by  Byron.  The  fact  was 
that  he  had  almost  from  his  childhood  shown  symptoms  of  lung 
disease,  which  developed  itself  very  rapidly.  The  sense  of  his 
almost  certain  fate  combined  with  the  ordinary  effects  of  passion 
to  throw  a  somewhat  hectic  air  over  his  correspondence  with 
Miss  Fanny  Brawne.  His  letters  to  her  contain  nothing  dis- 
creditable to  him,  but  ought  never  to  have  been  published.  He 
was,  however,  to  bring  out  his  third  and  greatest  book  of  verse 
in  1820;  and  then  he  sailed  for  Italy,  to  die  on  the  23rd  of 
February  1821.  He  spoke  of  his  name  as  "writ  in  water." 
Posterity  has  agreed  with  him  that  it  is — but  in  the  Water  of 
Life. 

Nothing  is  more  interesting,  even  in  the  endless  and  delight- 
ful task  of  literary  comparison,  than  to  contrast  the  work  of 
Shelley  and  Keats,  so  alike  and  yet  so  different.  A  little  longer 
space  of  work,  much  greater  advantages  of  means  and  education, 
and  a  happier  though  less  blameless  experience  of  passion,  enabled 
Shelley  to  produce  a  much  larger  body  of  work  than  Keats  has 
to  his  name,  even  when  this  is  swollen  by  what  Mr.  Palgrave 
has  justly  stigmatised  as  "  the  incomplete  and  inferior  work  "  with- 
held by  Keats  himself,  but  made  public  by  the  cruel  kindness 
of  admirers.  And  this  difference  in  bulk  probably  coincides 
with  a  difference  in  the  volume  of  genius  of  the  two  writers. 
Further,  while  it  is  not  at  all  improbable  that  if  Shelley  had 
lived  he  would  have  gone  on  writing  better  and  better,  the  same 
probability  is,  I  think,  to  be  more  sparingly  predicated  of 
Keats. 

On  the  other  hand,  by  a  not  uncommon  connection  or 
consequence,  Keats  has  proved  much  more  of  a  "germinal" 


88  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

_j_ , 

,    poet  than  Shelley.      Although  the  latter  was,  I  think,  by  far  the_ 
greater,  his  poetry  had  little  that  was  national  and  very  little  that 
"was  imitable  about  it,     He  has  had  a  vast  influence ;  but  it  has 
;  been  in  the  main  the  influence,  the  inspiration  of  his  unsurpassed 
J  exciting  power.       No  one  has  borrowed  or  carried  further  any 
specially  Shelleian  turns  of  phrase,  rhythm,  or  thought.     Those 
who   have   attempted  to   copy  and   urge   further   the   Shelleian 
attitude  towards  politics,   philosophy,  ethics,  and  the  like,  have 
made  it  generally  ludicrous  and   sometimes  disgusting.     He  is, 
in  his  own  famous  words,   "sorrething  remote  and  afar."     His 
poetry  is    almost   poetry   in   its   elements,  uncoloured   by    race, 
language,    time,    circumstance,   or   creed.      He    is    not   even    so 
much    a   poet    as    Poetry    accidentally    impersonated    and    in- 
carnate. 

With  Keats  it  is  very  different.  He  had  scarcely  reached 
maturity  of  any  kind  when  he  died,  and  he  laboured  under  the 
very  serious  disadvantages,  first  of  an  insufficient  acquaintance 
with  the  great  masters,  and  secondly  of  coming  early  under  the 
influence  of  a  rather  small  master,  yet  a  master,  Leigh  Hunt, 
who  taught  him  the  fluent,  gushing,  slipshod  style  that  brought 
not  merely  upon  him,  but  upon  his  mighty  successor  Tennyson, 
the  harsh  but  not  in  this  respect  wholly  unjust  lash  of  con- 
servative and  academic  criticism.  But  he,  as  no  one  of  his  own 
contemporaries  did,  felt,  expressed,  and  handed  on  the  exact 
change  wrought  in  English  poetry  by  the  great  Romantic  move- 
ment. Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  Scott,  and  even  Southey  to 
some  extent,  were  the  authors  of  this ;  but,  being  the  authors, 
they  were  necessarily  not  the  results  of  it.  Byron  was  funda- 
mentally out  of  sympathy  with  it,  though  by  accidents  of  time 
and  chance  he  had  to  enlist ;  Shelley,  an  angel,  and  an  effectual 
angel,  of  poetry,  was  hardly  a  man,  and  still  less  an  Englishman. 
But  Keats  felt  it  all,  expressed  what  of  it  he  had  time  and 
strength  to  express,  and  left  the  rest  to  his  successors,  helped, 
guided,  furthered  by  his  own  example.  Keats,  in  short,  is  the 
father,  directly  or  at  short  stages  of  descent,  of  every  English  poet 


ii  KEATS  89 

born  within  the  present  century  who  has  not  been  a  mere 
"  sport "  or  exception.  He  begat  Tennyson,  and  Tennyson 
begat  all  the  rest. 

The  evidences  of  this  are  to  be  seen  in  almost  his  earliest 
poems — not  necessarily  in  those  contained  in  his  earliest  volume. 
Of  course  they  are  not  everywhere.  There  were  sure  to  be, 
and  there  were,  mere  echoes  of  eighteenth  century  verse  and 
mere  imitations  of  earlier  writers.  But  these  may  be  simply 
neglected.  It  is  in  such  pieces  as  "  Calidore  "  that  the  new  note 
is  heard ;  and  though  something  in  this  note  may  be  due  to  Hunt 
(who  had  caught  the  original  of  it  from  Wither  and  Browne), 
Keats  changed,  enriched,  and  refashioned  the  thing  to  such  an 
extent  that  it  became  his  own.  It  is  less  apparent  (though 
perhaps  not  less  really  present)  in  his  sonnets,  despite  the  mag- 
nificence of  the  famous  one  on  Chapman's  Homer,  than  in  the 
couplet  poems,  which  are  written  in  an  extremely  fluent  and 
peculiar  verse,  very  much  "  enjambed "  or  overlapped,  and  with 
a  frequent  indulgence  in  double  rhymes.  Hunt  had  to  a 
certain  extent  started  this,  but  he  had  not  succeeded  in  giving 
it  anything  like  the  distinct  character  which  it  took  in  Keats's 
hands. 

Rndvmirn^  was  written  in  this  measure,  with  rare  breaks ;  and 
there  is  Tittle  doubt  that  the  lusciousness  of  the  rhythm,  combined 
as  it  was  with  a  certain  lusciousness  both  of  subject  and  (again 
in  unlucky  imitation  of  Hunt)  of  handling,  had  a  bad  effect  on 
some  readers,  as  also  that  the  attacks  on  it  were  to  a  certain 
extent,  though  not  a  very  large  one,  prompted  by  genuine  disgust  at 
the  mawkishness,  as  its  author  called  it,  of  the  tone.  Keats,  who 
was  always  an  admirable  critic  of  his  own  work,  judged  it  correctly 
enough  later,  except  that  he  was  too  harsh  to  it.  But  it  is  a 
delightful  poem  to  this  day,  and  I  do  not  think  that  it  is  just  to 
call  it,  as  it  has  been  called,  "not  Greek,  but  Elizabethan-Romantic." 
It  seerns  to  me  quite  different  from  Marlowe  or  the  author 
of  Britain's  Ida,  and  really  Greek,  but  Greek  mediaeval,  Greek 
of  the  late  romance  type,  refreshed  with  a  wonderful  new  blood  of 


90  THE  NKW  rOKTKY  CHAP. 

English  romanticism.  And  this  once  more  was  to  be  the  note  of 
all  the  best  poetry  of  the  century,  the  pouring  of  this  new^ 
English  blood  through  the  veins_oL_ald  subjects  —  classical, 
mediaeval,  foreign,  modern.  We  were  to  conquer  the  whole 
world  of  poetical  matter  with  our  English  armies,  and  Keats  was 
the  first  leader  who  started  the  adventure. 

The  perfect  poetry  of  his  later  work  showed  this  general 
tendency  in  all  its  choicest  pieces, — clearly  in  the  larger  poems,  the 
fine  but  perhaps  somewhat  overpraised  Hyperion ^  the  admirable 
Lamia,  the  exquisite  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  but  still  more  in  the  smaller, 
and  most  of  all  in  those  twin  peaks  of  all  his  poetry,  the  "  Ode 
on  a  Grecian  Urn  "  and  "  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci."  He  need 
indeed  have  written  nothing  but  these  two  to  show  himself  not 
merely  an  exquisite  poet  but  a  captain  and  leader  of  English 
poetry  for  many  a  year,  almost  for  many  a  generation  to  come. 
Wordsworth  may  have  given  him  a  little,  a  very  quiet  hint  for  the 
first,  the  more  Classical  masterpiece;  Coleridge  something  a  little 
louder  for  the  second,  the  Romantic.  But  in  neither  case  did  the 
summons  amount  to  anything  like  a  cue  or  a  call-bell ;  it.  was  at 
best  seed  that,  if  it  had  not  fallen  on  fresh  and  fruitful  soil,  could 
have  come  to  nothing. 

As  it  is,  and  if  we  wish  to  see  what  it  came  to,  we  must  simply 
look  at  the  whole  later  poetry  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 
England.  The  operations  of  the  spirit  are  not  to  be  limited,  and 
it  is  of  course  quite  possible  that  if  Keats  had  not  been,  something 
or  somebody  would  have  done  his  work  instead  of  him.  But  as 
it  is,  it  is  to  Keats  that  we  must  trace  Tennyson,  Rossetti,  Mr.  Swin- 
burne, Mr.  Morris  ;  to  Keats  that  even  not  a  little  of  Browning  has 
to  be  affiliated ;  to  Keats,  directly  or  indirectly,  that  the  greater  part 
of  the  poetry  of  nearly  three  generations  owes  royalty  and  allegi- 
ance. 

Of  him,  as  of  Shelk-y,  some  foolish  and  hurtful  things  have 
been  said.  In  life  he  was  no  effeminate  "aesthetic"  or  "decadent," 
divided  between  sensual  gratification  and  unmanly  Katzenjammer, 
between  paganism  and  puerility,  but  an  honest,  manly  Englishman. 


II  ROGERS  91 

whose  strength  only  yielded  to  unconquerable  disease,  whose 
impulses  were  always  healthy  and  generous.  Despite  his  origin — 
and,  it  must  be  added,  some  of  his  friendships — there  was  not  a 
touch  of  vulgarity  about  him ;  and  if  his  comic  vein  was  not  very 
full-pulsed,  he  had  a  merry  laugh  in  him.  There  is  no  "  poisonous 
honey  stolen  "  from  anywhere  or  extracted  by  himself  from  anything 
in  Keats  ;  his  sensuousness  is  nothing  more  than  is,  in  the  circum- 
stances, "necessary  and  voluptuous  and  right."  But  these  moral 
excellences,  while  they  may  add  to  the  satisfaction  with  which 
one  contemplates  him,  hardly  enhance — though  his  morbid 
admirers  seem  to  think  that  the  absence  of  them  would  enhance — 
the  greatness  and  the  value  of  his  poetical  position,  both  in  the 
elaboration  of  a  new  poetic  style  and  language,  and  still  more  in 
the  indication  of  a  new  road  whereby  the  great  poetic  exploration 
could  be  carried  on. 

Round  or  under  these  great  Seven — for  that  Byron  was  great 
in  a  way  need  not  be  denied,  while  Southey,  the  weakest  as  a 
poet,  had  a  very  strong  influence,  and  was  one  of  the  very  greatest 
of  English  men  of  letters  —  must  be  mentioned  a  not  incon- 
siderable number  of  men  who  in  any  other  age  would  have  been 
reckoned  great.  The  eldest  of  these,  both  in  years  and  in  repu- 
tation, holds  his  position,  and  perhaps  always  held  it,  rather  by 
courtesy  than  by  strict  right.  Samuel  Rogers l  was  born  in  London 
on  3oth  July  1763,  and  was  the  son  of  a  dissenting  banker,  from 
whom  he  derived  Whig  principles  and  a  comfortable  fortune.  It 
is  said  that  he  once,  as  a  very  young  man,  went  to  call  on  Dr. 
Johnson,  but  was  afraid  to  knock ;  but  though  shyness  accom- 
panied him  through  life,  the  amiability  which  it  is  sometimes 
supposed  to  betoken  did  not.  He  published  a  volume  of  poems 
in  1786,  and  his  famous  Pleasures  of  Memory,  the  piece  that 

1  Curiously  enough,  there  was  another  and  slightly  older  Samuel  Rogers,  a 
clergyman,  who  published  verse  in  1782,  just  before  his  namesake,  and  who  dealt 
with  Hope- 
Hope  springs  eternal  in  the  aspiring  breast. 

His  verse,  of  which  specimens  are  given  in  Southcy's  Modern  English  Poets,  is 
purely  eighteenth  century.  He  died  in  1790. 


92  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 


made  his  reputation,  in  1792.  Twenty  years  afterwards  Columbus 
followed,  and  yet  two  years  later,  in  1814,  Jacqueline ;  while  in 
1822  Italy,  on  which,  with  the  Pleasures  of  Memory,  such  fame  as 
he  has  rests,  was  published,  to  be  reissued  some  years  afterwards 
in  a  magnificent  illustrated  edition,  and  to  have  a  chance  (in  a 
classical  French  jest)  se  sauver  de  planche  en  planche.  He  did  not 
die  till  1855,  in  his  ninety-third  year :  the  last,  as  he  had  been  the 
first,  of  his  group. 

Rogers  had  the  good  luck  to  publish  his  best  piece  at  a  time 
when  the  general  and  popular  level  of  English  poetry  was  at  the 
lowest  point  it  had  reached  since  the  sixteenth  century,  and  to  be 
for  many  years  afterwards  a  rich  and  rather  hospitable  man,  the 
acquaintance  if  not  exactly  the  friend  of  most  men  of  letters,  of 
considerable  influence  in  political  and  general  society,  and  master 
of  an  excessively  sharp  tongue.  A  useful  friend  and  a  dangerous 
enemy,  it  was  simpler  to  court  or  to  let  him  alone  than  to  attack 
him,  and  his  fame  was  derived  from  pieces  too  different  from  any 
work  of  the  actual  generation  to  give  them  much  umbrage.  It 
may  be  questioned  whether  Rogers  ever  wrote  a  single  line  of 
poetry.  But  he  wrote  some  polished  and  pleasant  verse,  which 
was  vigorous  by  the  side  of  Hayley  and  "  correct "  by  the  side  of 
Keats.  In  literature  he  has  very  little  interest ;  in  literary  history 
he  has  some. 

Felix  opportunitate  in  the  same  way,  but  a  far  greater  poet, 
was  Thomas  Campbell,  who,  like  Rogers,  was  a  Whig,  like  him 
belonged  rather  to  the  Classical  than  to  the  Romantic  school  in  style 
if  not  in  choice  of  subject,  and  like  him  had  the  good  luck  to 
obtain,  by  a  poem  with  a  title  very  similar  to  that  of  Rogers's 
masterpiece,  a  high  reputation  at  a  time  when  there  was  very  little 
poetry  put  before  the  public.  Campbell  was  not  nearly  so  old  a  man 
as  Rogers,  and  was  even  the  junior  of  the  Lake  poets  and  Scott, 
having  been  born  at  Glasgow  on  the  271)1  July  1777.  His  father  was 
a  real  Campbell,  and  as  a  merchant  had  at  one  time  been  of  some 
fortune  ;  but  the  American  War  had  impoverished  him,  and  the 
poet  was  born  to  comparative  indigence.  He  did,  however,  well 


CAMPBELL  93 


at  the  college  of  his  native  city,  and  on  leaving  it  took  a  tutorship 
in  Mull.  His  Pleasures  of  Hope  was  published  in  1799  and  was 
extremely  popular,  nor  after  it  had  its  author  much  difficulty  in 
following  literature.  He  was  never  exactly  rich,  but  pensions, 
legacies,  editorships,  high  prices  for  his  not  extensive  poetical 
work,  and  higher  for  certain  exercises  in  prose  bookmaking  which 
are  now  almost  forgotten,  maintained  him  very  comfortably. 
Indeed,  of  the  many  recorded  ingratitudes  of  authors  to  publishers, 
Campbell's  celebrated  Health  to  Napoleon  because  "he  shot  a 
bookseller  "  is  one  of  the  most  ungrateful.  In  the  last  year  of  the 
eighteenth  century  he  went  to  Germany,  and  was  present  at  (or  in 
the  close  neighbourhood  of)  the  battle  of  Hohenlinden.  This 
he  afterwards  celebrated  in  really  immortal  verse,  which,  with  "Ye 
Mariners  of  England"  and  the  "Battle  of  the  Baltic,"  represents 
his  greatest  achievement.  In  1809  he  published  Gertrude  oj 
Wyoming,  a  short-long  poem  of  respectable  technique  and  gracefu1 
sentiment.  In  1824  appeared  a  volume  of  poems,  of  which  the 
chief,  Theodric  (not  as  it  is  constantly  misspelled  Theodoric\  is  bad  ' 
and  in  1842  another,  of  which  the  chief,  The  Pilgrim  of  Glencoe, 
is  worse.  He  died  in  1844  at  Boulogne,  after  a  life  which,  if  not 
entirely  happy  (for  he  had  ill-health,  not  improved  by  incautious 
habits,  some  domestic  misfortunes,  and  a  rather  sour  disposition), 
had  been  full  of  honours  of  all  kinds,  both  in  his  own  country, 
where  he  was  Lord  Rector  of  Glasgow  University,  and  out 
of  it. 

If  Campbell  had  written  nothing  but  his  longer  poems,  the 
comparison  above  made  with  Rogers  would  be  wholly,  instead  of 
partly,  justified.  Although  both  still  retain  a  sort  of  conventional 
respect,  it  is  impossible  to  call  either  The  Pleasures  of  Hope  or 
Gertrude  of  Wyoming  very  good  poetry,  while  enough  has  been 
said  of  their  successors.  Nor  can  very  high  praise  be  given  to 
most  of  the  minor  pieces.  But  the  three  splendid  war-songs  above 
named — the  equals,  if  not  the  superiors,  of  anything  of  the  kind  in 
English,  and  therefore  in  any  language — set  him  in  a  position 
from  which  he  is  never  likely  to  be  ousted.  In  a  handful  of 


94  THE  NEW  POETRY 


others — "  Lochiel,"  the  exquisite  lines  on  "  A  Deserted  Garden 
in  Argyleshire,"  with,  for  some  flashes  at  least,  the  rather  over- 
famed  "  Exile  of  Erin,"  "  Lord  Ullin's  Daughter,"  and  a  few  more 
— he  also  displays  very  high,  though  rather  unequal  and  by  no 
means  unalloyed,  poetical  faculty;  and  "The  Last  Man,"  which, 
by  the  way,  is  the  latest  of  his  good  things,  is  not  the  least.  But 
his  best  work  will  go  into  a  very  small  compass  :  a  single  octavo 
sheet  would  very  nearly  hold  it,  and  it  was  almost  all  written  before 
he  was  thirty.  He  is  thus  an  instance  of  a  kind  of  poet,  not  by  any 
means  rare  in  literature,  but  also  not  very  common,  who  appears 
to  have  a  faculty  distinct  in  class  but  not  great  in  volume,  who 
can  do  certain  things  better  than  almost  anybody  else,  but  cannot 
do  them  very  often,  and  is  not  quite  to  be  trusted  to  do  them 
with  complete  sureness  of  touch.  For  it  is  to  be  noted  that  even 
in  Campbell's  greatest  things  there  are  distinct  blemishes,  and 
that  these  blemishes  are  greatest  in  that  which  in  its  best  parts 
reaches  the  highest  level — "  The  Battle  of  the  Baltic."  Many 
third  and  some  tenth  rate  poets  would  never  have  left  in  their 
work  such  things  as  "  The  might  of  England  flushed  To  anticipate 
the  scene,"  which  is  half  fustian  and  half  nonsense  :  no  very  great 
poet  could  possibly  have  been  guilty  of  it.  Yet  for  all  this 
Campbell  holds,  as  has  been  said,  the  place  of  best  singer  of  war 
in  a  race  and  language  which  are  those  of  the  best  singers  and 
not  the  worst  fighters  in  the  history  of  the  world — in  the  race 
of  Nelson  and  the  language  of  Shakespeare.  Not  easily  shall  a 
man  win  higher  praise  than  this. 

In  politics,  as  well  as  in  a  certain  general  kind  of  literary 
attitude  and  school,  another  Thomas,  Moore,  classes  himself 
both  historically  and  naturally  with  Rogers  and  Campbell ;  but  he 
was  a  very  much  better  poet  than  Rogers,  and,  though  he  never 
reached  quite  the  same  height  as  Campbell  at  his  narrow  and 
exceptional  best,  a  far  more  voluminous  verse  writer  and  a  much 
freer  writer  of  good  verse  of  many  different  kinds.  He  was  born 
in  Dublin  on  28th  May  1779  >  ms  father  being  a  grocer,  his  mother 
somewhat  higher  in  social  rank.  He  was  well  educated,  and  was 


n  MOORE  95 

sent  to  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  where  he  had  but  surmounted 
political  difficulties ;  for  his  time  as  an  undergraduate  coincided 
with  "Ninety-eight,"  and  though  it  does  not  seem  that  he  had 
meddled  with  anything  distinctly  treasonable,  he  had  "National- 
ist" friends  and  leanings.  Partly  to  sever  inconvenient  associa- 
tions, partly  in  quest  of  fortune,  he  was  sent  to  London  in  that 
year,  and  entered  at  the  Temple.  In  a  manner  not  very  clearly 
explained,  but  connected  no  doubt  with  his  leaning  to  the  Whig 
party,  which  was  then  much  in  need  of  literary  help,  he  became  a 
protege  of  Lord  Moira's,  by  whom  he  was  introduced  to  the 
Prince  of  Wales.  The  Prince  accepted  the  dedication  of  some 
translations  of  Anacreon,  etc.,  which  Moore  had  brought  over 
with  him,  and  which  were  published  in  1800;  while  two  years 
later  the  Poems  of  Thomas  Little^  a  punning  pseudonym,  appeared, 
and  at  once  charmed  the  public  by  their  sugared  versification 
and  shocked  it  by  their  looseness  of  tone — a  looseness  which  is 
not  to  be  judged  from  the  comparatively  decorous  appearance 
they  make  in  modern  editions.  But  there  was  never  much  harm 
in  them.  Next  year,  in  1803,  Moore  received  a  valuable  appoint- 
ment at  Bermuda,  which,  though  he  actually  went  out  to  take 
possession  of  it  and  travelled  some  time  in  North  America,  he 
was  allowed  to  transfer  to  a  deputy.  He  came  back  to  England, 
published  another  volume  of  poems,  and  fought  a  rather  famously 
futile  duel  with  Jeffrey  about  a  criticism  on  it  in  the  Edinburgh 
Review.  He  began  the  Irish  Melodies  in  1807,  married  four  years 
later,  and  from  that  time  fixed  his  headquarters  mostly  in  the 
country  :  first  near  Ashbourne  in  Derbyshire,  then  near  Devizes  in 
Wiltshire,  to  be  near  his  patrons  Lord  Moira  and  Lord  Lans- 
downe.  But  he  was  constantly  in  London  on  visits,  and  much  in 
the  society  of  men  of  letters,  not  merely  of  his  own  party.  In 
particular  he  became,  on  the  whole,  Byron's  most  intimate  friend, 
and  preserved  towards  that  very  difficult  person  an  attitude 
(tinged  neither  with  the  servility  nor  with  the  exaggerated  inde- 
pendence of  the  parvenu)  which  did  him  a  great  deal  of  credit. 
He  was  rather  a  strong  partizan,  and,  having  a  brilliant  vein  of 


96  THE  NEW  POETRY 


poetical  satire,  he  wrote  in  1813  77ie  Twopenny  Post  Bag—\\\c. 
best  satiric  verse  of  the  poetical  kind  since  the  Anti-Jacobin,  and 
the  best  on  the  Whig  side  since  the  Rolliad. 

Nor  did  he  fail  to  take  advantage  of  the  popular  appetite  for 
long  poems  which  Scott  and  Byron  had  created  ;  his  f.af/a  Rookh, 
published  in  1817,  being  very  popular  and  very  profitable.  It 
was  succeeded  by  another  and  his  best  satirical  work,  The  Fudge 
Family,  a  charming  thing. 

Up  to  this  time  he  had  been  an  exceedingly  fortunate  man  ;  and 
his  good  luck,  aided  it  must  bt  said  by  his  good  conduct, — for 
Moore,  with  all  his  apparent  weaknesses,  was  thoroughly  sound  at 
the  core, — enabled  him  to  surmount  a  very  serious  reverse  of 
fortune.  His  Bermuda  deputy  was  guilty  of  malversation  so 
considerable  that  Moore  could  not  meet  the  debt,  and  he  had  to 
go  abroad.  But  Lord  Lansdowne  discharged  his  obligations;  and 
Moore  paid  Lord  Lansdowne.  He  returned  to  England  in  1823, 
and  was  a  busy  writer  for  all  but  the  last  years  of  the  thirty  that 
remained  to  him  ;  but  the  best  of  his  work  was  done,  with  one 
exception.  Byron  left  him  his  Memoirs,  which  would  of  course 
have  been  enormously  profitable.  But  Lady  Byron  and  others  of 
the  poet's  connections  were  so  horrified  at  the  idea  of  the  book 
appearing  that,  by  an  arrangement  which  has  been  variously 
judged,  but  which  can  hardly  be  regarded  as  other  than  dis- 
interested on  Moore's  part,  the  MS.  was  destroyed,  and 
instead  of  it  Moore  brought  out  in  1830  his  well  known  Life  of 
Byron.  This  some  not  incompetent  judges  have  regarded 
as  ranking  next  to  Lockhart's  Scott  and  Boswell's  Johnson,  and 
though  its  main  attraction  may  be  derived  from  Uyron's  very 
remarkable  letters,  it  still  shows  on  the  part  of  the  biographer  very 
unusual  dexterity,  good  feeling,  and  taste.  The  lives  of  Sheridan 
and  Lord  Edward  Fitzgerald  had,  and  deserved  to  have,  less 
success ;  while  a  History  of  Ireland  was,  and  was  bound  to  be,  an 
almost  complete  failure.  For,  though  a  very  good  prose  writer, 
Moore  had  little  of  the  erudition  required,  no  grasp  or  Faculty  of 
political  argument,  and  was  at  this  time  of  his  life,  if  not  earlier, 


it  MOORE  97 

something  of  a  trimmer,  certain  to  satisfy  neither  the  "ascendency" 
nor  the  "  nationalist "  parties.  His  prose  romance  of  The 
Epicurean  is  much  better,  and  a  really  remarkable,  piece  of  work, 
and  though  the  Loves  of  the  Angels,  his  last  long  poem,  is  not  very 
good,  he  did  not  lose  his  command  either  of  sentimental  or  of 
facetious  lyric  till  quite  his  last  days.  These  were  clouded ;  for, 
like  his  contemporaries  Scott  and  Southey,  he  suffered  from  brain 
disease  for  some  time  before  his  death,  on  25th  February  1852. 

During  his  lifetime,  especially  during  the  first  half  or  two-thirds 
of  his  literary  career,  Moore  had  a  great  popularity,  and  won  no 
small  esteem  even  among  critics ;  such  discredit  as  attached  to 
him  being  chiefly  of  the  moral  kind,  and  that  entertained  only  by 
very  strait-laced  persons.  But  as  the  more  high-flown  and  im- 
passioned muses  of  Wordsworth,  of  Shelley,  and  of  Keats  gained 
the  public  ear  in  the  third  and  later  decades  of  the  century,  a 
fashion  set  in  of  regarding  him  as  a  mere  melodious  trifler  ;  and 
this  has  accentuated  itself  during  the  last  twenty  years  or  so, 
though  quite  recently  some  efforts  have  been  made  in  protest. 
This  estimate  is  demonstrably  unjust.  It  is  true  that  of  the 
strange  and  high  notes  of  poetry  he  has  very  few,  of  the  very 
strangest  and  highest  none  at  all.  But  his  long  poems,  Lalla 
Rookh  especially,  though  somewhat  over-burdened  with  the  then 
fashionable  deck  cargo  of  erudite  or  would-be  erudite  notes, 
possess  merit  which  none  but  a  very  prejudiced  critic  can,  or  at 
least  ought  to,  overlook.  And  in  other  respects  he  is  very  nearly, 
if  not  quite,  at  the  top  of  at  least  two  trees,  which,  if  not  quite 
cedars  of  Lebanon,  are  not  mere  grass  of  Parnassus.  Moore 
was  a  born  as  well  as  a  trained  musician.  But  whereas  most 
musicians  have  since  the  seventeenth  century  been  exceedingly 
ill  at  verbal  numbers,  he  had  a  quite  extraordinary  knack  of 
composing  what  are  rather  disrespectfully  called  "  words."  Among 
his  innumerable  songs  there  are  not  one  or  two  dozens  or  scores, 
but  almost  hundreds  of  quite  charmingly  melodious  things, 
admirably  adjusted  to  their  music,  and  delightful  by  themselves 
without  any  kind  of  instrument,  and  as  said  not  sung.  And,  what 

H 


98  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

is  more,  among  these  there  is  a  very  respectable  number  to  which 
it  would  be  absolutely  absurd  to  give  the  name  of  trifle.  "  I  saw 
from  the  beach  "  is  not  a  trifle,  nor  "  When  in  death  I  shall  calm 
recline,"  nor  "Oft  in  the  stilly  night,"  nor  "Tell  me,  kind  sage,  I 
pray  thee,"nor  many  others.  They  have  become  so  hackneyed  to 
us  in  various  ways,  and  some  of  them  happen  to  be  pitched  in  a  key 
of  diction  which,  though  not  better  or  worse  than  others,  is  so  out 
of  fashion,  that  it  seems  as  if  some  very  respectable  judges  could 
not  "focus"  Moore  at  all.  To  those  who  can  he  will  seem,  not 
of  course  the  equal,  or  anything  like  the  equal,  of  Burns  or  Shelley, 
of  Blake  or  Keats,  but  in  his  own  way, — and  that  a  way  legitimate 
and  not  low, — one  of  the  first  lyrical  writers  in  English.  And 
they  will  admit  a  considerable  addition  to  his  claims  in  his 
delightful  satirical  verse,  mainly  but  not  in  the  least  offensively 
political,  in  which  kind  he  is  as  easily  first  as  in  the  sentimental 
song  to  music. 

Something  not  dissimilar  to  the  position  which  Moore  occupies 
on  the  more  classical  wing  of  the  poets  of  the  period  is  occupied 
on  the  other  by  Leigh  Hunt.  Hunt  (Henry  James  Leigh,  who 
called  himself  and  is  generally  known  by  the  third  only  of  his 
Christian  names)  was  born  in  London  on  the  igth  October  1784, 
was  educated  at  Christ's  Hospital,  began  writing  very  early,  held 
for  a  short  time  a  clerkship  in  a  public  office,  and  then  joined  his 
brother  in  conducting  the  Examiner  newspaper.  Fined  and 
imprisoned  for  a  personal  libel  on  the  Prince  Regent  (1812), 
Hunt  became  the  fashion  with  the  Opposition  ;  and  the  Story  oj 
Rimini,  which  he  published  when  he  came  out  of  gaol,  and  which 
was  written  in  it,  had  a  good  deal  of  influence.  He  spent  some 
years  in  Italy,  to  which  place  he  had  gone  with  his  family  in  1822 
to  edit  The  J.il'cral  and  to  keep  house  with  Byron — a  very  disastrous 
experiment,  the  results  of  which  he  recorded  in  an  offensive  book 
on  his  return.  Hunt  lived  to  iSth  August  1859,  and  was  rescued 
from  the  chronic  state  of  impecuniosity  in  which,  despite  constant 
literary  work,  he  had  long  lived,  by  a  Crown  pension  and  some 
other  assistance  in  his  latest  days.  Personally,  Leigh  Hunt  was 


ii  LEIGH  HUNT HOGG  99 

an  agreeable  and  amiable  being  enough,  with  certain  foibles 
which  were  rather  unfairly  magnified  in  the  famous  caricature  of 
him  as  Harold  Skimpole  by  his  friend  Dickens,  but  which  were 
accompanied  by  some  faults  of  taste  of  which  Mr.  Skimpole  is 
not  accused. 

In  letters  he  was  a  very  considerable  person ;  though  the  best 
and  far  the  largest  part  of  his  work  is  in  prose,  and  will  be 
noticed  hereafter.  His  verse  is  not  great  in  bulk,  and  is  perhaps 
more  original  and  stimulating  than  positively  good.  His  wide  and 
ardent  study  of  the  older  English  poets  and  of  those  of  Italy  had 
enabled  him  to  hit  on  a  novel  style  of  phrase  and  rhythm,  which 
has  been  partly  referred  to  above  in  the  notice  of  Keats ;  his 
narrative  faculty  was  strong,  and  some  of  his  smaller  pieces,  from 
his  sonnets  downwards,  are  delightful  things.  "  Abou  ben 
Adhem "  unites  (a  rare  thing  for  its  author)  amiability  with 
dignity,  stateliness  with  ease  ;  the  "  Nile  "  sonnet  is  splendid ; 
"Jenny  kissed  me,"  charming,  if  not  faultless;  "The  Man  and 
the  Fish,"  far  above  vulgarity.  The  lack  of  delicate  taste  which 
characterised  his  manners  also  marred  his  verse,  which  is  not 
unfrequently  slipshod,  or  gushing,  or  trivially  fluent,  and  perhaps 
never  relatively  so  good  as  the  best  of  his  prose.  But  he  owed 
little  to  any  but  the  old  masters,  and  many  contemporaries  owed 
not  a  little  to  him. 

A  quaint  and  interesting,  if  not  supremely  important  figure 
among  the  poets  of  this  period,  and,  if  his  poetry  and  prose  be 
taken  together,  a  very  considerable  man  of  letters, — perhaps  the 
most  considerable  man  of  letters  in  English  who  was  almost 
totally  uneducated, — was  James  Hogg,  who  was  born  in  Ettrick 
Forest  in  the  year  1772.  He  was  taken  from  school  to  mind 
sheep  so  early  that  much  later  he  had  to  teach  himself  even 
reading  and  writing  afresh ;  and,  though  he  must  have  had  the 
song-gift  early,  it  was  not  till  he  was  nearly  thirty  that  he  pub- 
lished anything.  He  was  discovered  by  Scott,  to  whom  he  and 
his  mother  supplied  a  p;ood  deal  of  matter  for  the  Border 
Minstrelsy,  and  he  published  again  in  1803.  The  rest  of  his  life 


THE  NEW  POETRY 


was  divided  between  writing — with  fair  success,  though  with  some 
ill-luck  from  bankrupt  publishers — and  sheep-farming,  on  which  he 
constantly  lost,  though  latterly  he  sat  rent-free  under  the  Duke  of 
Buccleuch.  He  died  on  2ist  November  1835. 

Even  during  his  life  Hogg  underwent  a  curious  process  of 
mythopceia  at  the  hands  of  Wilson  and  the  other  wits  of  Black- 
wood's  Magazine,  who  made  him — partly  with  his  own  consent, 
partly  not — into  the  famous  "  Ettrick  Shepherd "  of  the  Nodes 
Ambrosiance.  "  The  Shepherd  "  has  Hogg's  exterior  features  and 
a  good  many  of  his  foibles,  but  is  endowed  with  considerably 
more  than  his  genius.  Even  in  his  published  and  acknowledged 
works,  which  are  numerous,  it  is  not  always  quite  easy  to  be  sure 
of  his  authorship  ;  for  he  constantly  solicited,  frequently  received, 
and  sometimes  took  without  asking,  assistance  from  Lockhart 
and  others.  But  enough  remains  that  is  different  from  the  work 
of  any  of  his  known  or  possible  coadjutors  to  enable  us  to  distin- 
guish his  idiosyncrasy  pretty  well.  In  verse  he  was  a  very  fluent 
and  an  exceedingly  unequal  writer,  who  in  his  long  poems  chiefly, 
and  not  too  happily,  followed  Scott,  but  who  in  the  fairy  poem  of 
"  Kilmeny  "  displayed  an  extraordinary  command  of  a  rare  form  of 
poetry,  and  who  has  written  some  dozens  of  the  best  songs  in  the 
language.  The  best,  but  only  a  few  of  the  best,  of  these  are 
"Donald  Macdonald,"  "Donald  M'Gillavry,"  "The  Village  of 
Balmawhapple,"  and  the  "Boy's  Song/'  In  prose  he  chiefly 
attempted  novels,  which  have  no  construction  at  all,  and  few 
merits  of  dialogue  or  style,  but  contain  some  powerful  passages  ; 
while  one  of  them,  The  Confessions  of  a  Justified  Sinner,  if  it  is 
entirely  his,  which  is  very  doubtful,  is  by  far  the  greatest  thing  he 
wrote,  being  a  story  of  diablerie  very  well  designed,  wonderfully 
fresh  and  enthralling  in  detail,  and  kept  up  with  hardly  a  slip  to 
the  end.  His  other  chief  prose  works  are  entitled  The  Brownie 
of  Bodsbcck,  The  Three  Perils  of  jlf,in,  The  Three  J\>n/s  of 

Woman,  and  Altrive  Tales,  while  he  also  wrote  some  unimport- 
ant, and  in  parts  very  offensive,  but  also  in  parts  amusing,  /u.v>//<r- 

tions  oj  Sir  \\\ilter  Scott.      His  verse  volumes,  no  one  of  which  is 


ii  LANDOR  101 

good  throughout,  though  hardly  one  is  without  good  things,  were 
The  Mountain  Bard,  The  Queen's  Wake,  Mador  of  the  Moor,  The 
Pilgrims  of  the  Sun,  Jacobite  Relics  (some  of  the  best  forged  by 
himself),  Queen  Hynde,  and  The  Border  Garland. 

A  greater  writer,  if  his  work  be  taken  as  a  whole,  than  any 
who  has  been  mentioned  since  Keats,  was  Walter  Savage  Landor, 
much  of  whose  composition  was  in  prose,  but  who  was  so  alike 
in  prose  and  verse  that  the  whole  had  better  be  noticed  together 
here.  Landor  (who  was  of  a  family  of  some  standing  in  Warwick- 
shire, and  was  heir  to  considerable  property,  much  of  which  he 
wasted  later  by  selling  his  inheritance  and  buying  a  large  but 
unprofitable  estate  in  Wales)  was  born  at  Ipsley  Court  in  1775. 
He  went  to  school  at  Rugby,  and  thence  to  Trinity  College, 
Oxford,  at  both  of  which  places  he  gained  considerable  scholar- 
ship, but  was  frequently  in  trouble  owing  to  the  intractable  and 
headstrong  temper  which  distinguished  him  through  life.  He  was 
indeed  rusticated  from  his  college,  and  subsequently,  owing  to  his  ex- 
travagant political  views,  was  refused  a  commission  in  the  Warwick- 
shire Militia.  He  began  to  write  early,  but  the  poem  of  Gebir, 
which  contains  in  germ  or  miniature  nearly  all  his  characteristics 
of  style,  passed  almost  unnoticed  by  the  public,  though  it  was 
appreciated  by  good  wits  like  Southey  and  De  Quincey. 
After  various  private  adventures  he  came  into  his  property  and 
volunteered  in  the  service  of  Spain,  where  he  failed,  as  usual,  from 
impracticableness.  In  1811,  recklessly  as  always,  he  married 
a  very  young  girl  of  whom  he  knew  next  to  nothing,  and  the 
marriage  proved  anything  but  a  happy  one.  The  rest  of  his  long 
life  was  divided  into  three  residences  :  first  with  his  family  at 
Florence  ;  then,  when  he  had  quarrelled  with  his  wife,  at  Bath  ;  and 
lastly  (when  he  had  been  obliged  to  quit  Bath  and  England 
owing  to  an  outrageous  lampoon  on  one  lady,  which  he  had 
written,  as  he  conceived,  in  chivalrous  defence  of  another)  at 
Florence  again.  Here  he  died  in  September  1864,  aged  very 
nearly  ninety. 

Landor's    poetical     productions,    which     are     numerous,    are 


102  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

spread  over  the  greater  part  of  his  life ;  his  prose,  by  which  he  is 
chiefly  known,  dates  in  the  main  from  the  last  forty  years  of  it,  the 
best  being  written  between  1 820  and  1 840.  The  greater  part  of  this 
prose  takes  the  form  of  "  Imaginary  Conversations  " — sometimes 
published  under  separate  general  headings,  sometimes  under  the 
common  title — between  characters  of  all  ages,  from  the  classical 
times  to  Lander's.  Their  bulk  is  very  great ;  their  perfection  of 
style  at  the  best  extraordinary,  and  on  the  whole  remarkably 
uniform  ;  their  value,  when  considerations  of  matter  are  added  to 
that  of  form,  exceedingly  unequal.  For  in  them  Landor  not  only 
allowed  the  fullest  play  to  the  ungovernable  temper  and  the 
childish  crotchets  already  mentioned,  but  availed  himself  of  his 
opportunities  (for,  though  he  endeavoured  to  maintain  a  pretence 
of  dramatic  treatment,  his  work  is  nearly  as  personal  as  that  of 
Byron)  to  deliver  his  sentiments  on  a  vast  number  of  subjects, 
sometimes  without  too  much  knowledge,  and  constantly  with  a 
plentiful  lack  of  judgment.  In  politics,  in  satiric  treatment,  and 
especially  in  satiric  treatment  of  politics,  he  is  very  nearly  value- 
less. But  his  intense  familiarity  with  and  appreciation  of 
classical  subjects  gave  to  almost  all  his  dealings  with  them  a  value 
which,  for  parallel  reasons,  is  also  possessed  by  those  touching 
Italy.  And  throughout  this  enormous  collection  of  work  (which 
in  the  compactest  edition  fills  five  large  octavo  volumes  in  small 
print),  whensoever  the  author  forgets  his  crotchets  and  his  rages, 
when  he  touches  on  the  great  and  human  things,  his  utterance 
reaches  the  very  highest  water-mark  of  English  literature  that  is 
not  absolutely  the  work  of  supreme  genius. 

For  supreme  genius  Landor  had  not.  His  brain  was  not 
a  great  brain,  and  he  did  not  possess  the  exquisite  alertness  to  his 
own  weaknesses,  or  the  stubborn  knack  of  confinement  to  things 
suitable  to  him,  which  some  natures  much  smaller  than  the  great 
ones  have  enjoyed.  But  he  had  the  faculty  of  elaborate  style  — 
of  style  elaborated  by  a  careful  education  after  the  best  models 
and  vivified  by  a  certain  natural  gilt  as  no  one  since  the  seven- 
teenth century  had  had  it,  and  as  no  one  except  Mr.  Ruskin  and 


II  LANDOR  103 

the  late  Mr.  Pater  has  had  since.  Also,  he  was  as  much  wider 
in  his  range  and  more  fertile  in  his  production  than  Mr.  Pater 
as  he  was  more  solidly  grounded  on  the  best  models  than  Mr. 
Ruskin.  Where  Landor  is  quite  unique  is  in  the  apparent 
indifference  with  which  he  was  able  to  direct  this  gift  of  his  into 
the  channels  of  prose  and  poetry — a  point  on  which  he  parts 
company  from  both  the  writers  to  whom  he  has  been  compared, 
and  in  which  his  only  analogue,  so  far  as  I  am  able  to  judge,  is 
Victor  Hugo.  The  style  of  no  Englishman  is  so  alike  in  the  two 
harmonies  as  is  that  of  Landor.  And  it  is  perhaps  not  surprising 
that,  this  being  the  case,  he  shows  at  his  best  in  prose  when  he 
tries  long  pieces,  in  verse  when  he  tries  short  ones.  Some  of 
Lander's  prose  performances  in  Pericles  and  Aspasia,  in  the 
Pentameron  (where  Boccaccio  and  Petrarch  are  the  chief  inter- 
locutors), and  in  not  a  few  of  the  separate  conversations,  are  alto- 
gether unparalleled  in  any  other  language,  and  not  easy  to  parallel 
in  English.  They  are  never  entirely  or  perfectly  natural ;  there  is 
always  a  slight  "  smell  of  the  lamp,"  but  of  a  lamp  perfumed  and 
undying.  The  charm  is  so  powerful,  the  grace  so  stately,  that  it 
is  impossible  for  any  one  to  miss  it  who  has  the  faculty  of  recognis- 
ing charm  and  grace  at  all.  In  particular,  Landor  is  remarkable — • 
and,  excellent  as  are  many  of  the  prose  writers  whom  we  have 
had  since,  he  is  perhaps  the  most  remarkable — for  the  weight,  the 
beauty,  and  the  absolute  finish  of  his  phrase.  Sometimes  these 
splendid  phrases  do  not  mean  very  much ;  occasionally  they  mean 
nothing  or  nonsense.  But  their  value  as  phrase  survives,  and  the 
judge  in  such  things  is  often  inclined  and  entitled  to  say  that 
there  is  none  like  them. 

This  will  prepare  the  reader  who  has  some  familiarity  \vith 
literature  for  what  is  to  be  said  about  Lander's  verse.  It  always 
has  a  certain  quality  of  exquisiteness,  but  this  quality  is  and  could 
not  but  be  unequally  displayed  in  the  short  poems  and  the  long. 
The  latter  can  hardly  attain,  with  entirely  competent  and  im- 
partial judges,  more  than  a  success  of  esteem.  Gebir  is  couched  in 
a  Miltonic  form  of  verse  (very  slightly  shot  and  varied  by  Romantic 


104  THE  NEW  POETRY 


admixture)  which,  as  is  natural  to  a  young  adventurer,  caricatures 
the  harder  and  more  ossified  style  of  the  master.  Sometimes  it 
is  great ;  more  usually  it  intends  greatness.  The  "  Dialogues  in 
Verse  "  (very  honestly  named,  for  they  are  in  fact  rather  dialogues 
in  verse  than  poems),  though  executed  by  the  hand  of  a  master 
both  of  verse  and  dialogue,  differ  in  form  rather  than  in  fact 
from  the  Conversations  in  prose.  The  Hellenics  are  mainly 
dialogues  in  verse  with  a  Greek  subject.  All  have  a  quality  of 
nobility  which  may  be  sought  in  vain  in  almost  any  other  poet ; 
but  all  have  a  certain  stiffness  and  frigidity,  some  a  certain  empti- 
ness. They  are  never  plaster,  as  some  modern  antiques  have 
been  ;  but  they  never  make  the  marble  of  which  they  are  com- 
posed wholly  flesh.  Landor  was  but  a  half-Pygmalion. 

The  vast  collection  of  his  miscellaneous  poems  contains  many 
more  fortunate  attempts,  some  of  which  have,  by  common  consent 
of  the  fittest,  attained  a  repute  which  they  are  never  likely  to  lose. 
"Rose  Aylmer"  and  "  Dirce,"  trifles  in  length  as  both  of  them 
are,  are  very  jewels  of  poetic  quality.  And  among  the  hundreds 
and  almost  thousands  of  pieces  which  Landor  produced  there 
are  some  which  come  not  far  short  of  these,  and  very  many 
which  attain  a  height  magnificent  as  compared  with  the  ordinary 
work  of  others.  But  the  hackneyed  comparison  of  amber  does 
something  gall  this  remarkable  poet  and  writer.  Everything, 
great  and  small,  is  enshrined  in  an  imperishable  coating  of 
beautiful  style ;  but  the  small  things  are  somewhat  out  of  pro- 
portion to  the  great,  and,  what  is  more,  the  amber  itself  always 
has  a  certain  air  of  being  deliberately  and  elaborately  produced — 
not  of  growing  naturally.  Landor — much  more  than  Dryden,  of 
whom  he  used  the  phrase,  but  in  the  same  class  as  Dryden — is 
one  of  those  who  "  wrestle  with  and  conquer  time."  He  has 
conquered,  but  it  is  rather  as  a  giant  of  celestial  nurture  than  as 
an  unquestioned  god. 

Even  after  enumerating  these  two  sets  of  names — the  first  al!  of 
the  greatest,  and  the  greatest  of  the  second,  Landor,  equalling  the 
least  of  the  first — we  have  not  exhausted  the  poetical  riches  of 


II  BOWLES  105 

this  remarkable  period.  It  is  indeed  almost  dangerous  to  embark 
on  the  third  class  of  poets ;  yet  its  members  here  would  in  some 
cases  have  been  highly  respectable  earlier,  and  even  at  this 
time  deserve  notice  either  for  influence,  or  for  intensity  of  poetic 
vein,  or  sometimes  for  the  mere  fact  of  having  been  once  famous 
and  having  secured  a  "place  in  the  story."  The  story  of  litera- 
ture has  no  popular  ingratitude ;  and,  except  in  the  case  of  distinct 
impostors,  it  turns  out  with  reluctance  those  who  have  once  been 
admitted  to  it.  Sometimes  even  impostors  deserve  a  renewal 
of  the  brand,  if  not  a  freshening  up  of  the  honourable  inscrip- 
tion. 

The  first  of  this  third  class  in  date,  and  perhaps  the  first  in 
influence,  though  far  indeed  from  being  the  first  in  merit,  was 
William  Lisle  Bowles,  already  once  or  twice  referred  to.  He  was 
born  on  24th  September  1762  ;  so  that,  but  for  the  character  and 
influence  of  his  verse,  he  belongs  tc  the  last  chapter  rather  than 
to  this.  Educated  at  Winchester  and  at  Trinity  College,  Oxford, 
he  took  orders,  and  spent  nearly  the  last  half  century  of  his  very 
long  life  (he  did  not  die  till  1850)  in  Wiltshire,  as  Prebendary 
of  Salisbury  and  Rector  of  Bremhill.  It  was  in  the  year  of  the 
French  Revolution  that  he  published  his  Fourteen  Sonnets  [after- 
wards enlarged  in  number],  written  chiefly  on  Picturesque  Spots 
during  a  Journey.  These  fell  early  into  Coleridge's  hands ;  he 
copied  and  recopied  them  for  his  friends  when  he  was  a  blue-coat 
boy,  and  in  so  far  as  poetical  rivers  have  any  single  source,  the 
first  tricklings  of  the  stream  which  welled  into  fulness  with  the 
Lyrical  Ballads,  and  some  few  years  later  swept  all  before  it,  may  be 
assigned  to  this  very  feeble  fount.  For  in  truth  it  is  exceedingly 
feeble.  In  the  fifth  edition  (1796),  which  lies  before  me  exquisitely 
printed,  with  a  pretty  aquatint  frontispiece  by  Alken,  and  a  dedi- 
cation of  the  previous  year  to  Dean  Ogle  of  Winchester,  the 
Sonnets  have  increased  to  twenty-seven,  and  are  supplemented 
by  fifteen  "  miscellaneous  pieces."  One  of  these  latter  is  itself 
a  sonnet  "  written  at  Southampton,"  and  in  all  respects  similar  to 
the  rest.  The  others — "On  Leaving  Winchester,"  "On  the 


106  THE  NEW  POETRY 


Death  of  Mr.  Headley"  the  critic,  a  man  of  worth,1  "To  Mr. 
Burke  on  his  Reflections,"  and  so  forth — are  of  little  note.  The 
same  may  be  said  of  Bowles's  later  poetical  productions,  which 
were  numerous  ;  but  his  edition  of  Pope,  finished  in  1807,  Drought, 
about  a  hot  controversy  not  yet  forgotten  (nor,  to  tell  the  truth, 
quite  settled)  on  the  question  Whether  Pope  was  a  poet  ?  That 
Bowles  can  have  had  scant  sympathy  with  Pope  is  evident  trom 
the  very  first  glance  at  the  famous  sonnets  themselves.  Besides 
their  form,  which,  as  has  been  said,  was  of  itself  something  of  a 
reactionary  challenge,  they  bear  strong  traces  of  Gray,  and  still 
stronger  traces  of  the  picturesque  mania  which  was  at  the  same  time 
working  so  strongly  in  the  books  of  Gilpin  and  others.  But  their 
real  note  is  the  note  which,  ringing  in  Coleridge's  ear,  echoed  in 
all  the  poetry  of  the  generation,  the  note  of  unison  between  the 
aspect  of  nature  and  the  thought  and  emotion  of  man.  In  the 
sonnets  "  At  Tynemouth,"  "  At  Bamborough  Castle,"  and  indeed 
in  all,  more  or  less,  there  is  first  the  attempt  to  paint  directly 
what  the  eye  sees,  not  the  generalised  and  academic,  view  of  the 
type-scene  by  a  type-poet  which  had  been  the  fashion  for  so  long ; 
and,  secondly,  the  attempt  to  connect  this  vision  with  personal 
experience,  passion,  or  meditation.  Bowles  does  nut  do  this 
very  well,  but  he  tries  to  do  it ;  and  the  others,  seeing  him  try, 
went  and  did  it. 

His  extreme  importance  as  an  at  least  admitted   "origin"  has 

1  Henry  Headley,  who,  like  Bowles  and  Landor,  was  a  member  of  Trinity 
College,  Oxford,  and  who  died  young,  after  publishing  a  few  original  poems  of 
no  great  value,  deserves  more  credit  for  his  Sekct  Beauties  of  .-Infiini  English 
Poetry,  published  in  two  volumes,  with  an  exquisite  title-page  vignette,  by  Cadell 
in  1787,  than  has  sometimes  been  allowed  him  by  the  not  numerous  critics  who 
have  noticed  him  recently,  or  by  those  who  immediately  followed  him.  lli.s  know- 
ledge was  soon  outgrown,  and  therefore  looked  down  upon  ;  and  his  taste  was  a 
very  little  indiscriminate.  But  it  was  something  to  put  before  an  ag<'  which  was 
just  awakening  to  the  appetite  for  such  things  two  volumes  full  of  selections 
from  the  too  little  read  poets  of  the  seventeenth,  with  a  few  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  Moreover,  Headley's  biographical  information  shows  very  praiseworthy 
industry,  and  his  critical  remarks  a  great  deal  of  taste  at  on^e  n:<  e  and  fairly 
catholic.  A  man  who  in  hi-,  day  could,  while  sel- c'.ing  and  ;r,r.::ng  forth 
Drayton  and  Carew,  I  >anicl  and  King,  >peak  eiitlni.-ia.-tically  of  I  >:-vder.  and 
even  of  (iold.-iiuith,  must  have  had  the  root  of  the  matter  in  him  as  fi-w  critics 
have  hail. 


MINOR  POETS  107 


procured  him  notice  somewhat  beyond  his  real  deserts  ;  over  others 
we  must  pass  more  rapidly.  Robert  Bloomfield,  born  in  1760, 
was  one  of  those  unfortunate  "  prodigy "  poets  whom  mistaken 
kindness  encourages.  He  was  the  son  of  a  tailor,  went  early  to 
agricultural  labour,  and  then  became  a  shoemaker.  His  Farmer's 
Boy,  an  estimable  but  much  over-praised  piece,  was  published  in 
1800,  and  he  did  other  things  later.  He  died  mad,  or  nearly  so, 
in  1823 — a  melancholy  history  repeated  pretty  closely  a  generation 
later  by  John  Clare.  Clare,  however,  was  a  better  poet  than 
Bloomfield,  and  some  of  the  "Poems  written  in  an  Asylum" 
have  more  than  merely  touching  merit.  James  Montgomery,1 
bom  at  Irvine  on  4th  November  1771,  was  the  son  of  a  Moravian 
minister,  and  intended  for  his  father's  calling.  He,  however, 
preferred  literature  and  journalism,  establishing  himself  chiefly  at 
Sheffield,  where  he  died  as  late  as  1854  (3oth  April).  He  had,  as 
editor  of  the  Sheffield  Iris,  some  troubles  with  the  law,  and  in  1835 
was  rewarded  with  a  pension.  Montgomery  was  a  rather  copious 
and  fairly  pleasing  minor  bard,  no  bad  hand  at  hymns  and  short 
occasional  pieces,  and  the  author  of  longer  things  called  The 
Wanderer  of  Switzerland,  The  West  Indies,  The  World  before  the 
Flood,  and  The  Pelican  Island.  Bernard  Barton,  an  amiable 
Quaker  poet,  will  probably  always  be  remembered  as  the  friend 
and  correspondent  of  Charles  Lamb  ;  perhaps  also  as  the  father- 
in-law  of  Edward  FitzGerald.  His  verse  commended  itself  both  to 
Southey  (who  had  a  kindly  but  rather  disastrous  weakness  for 
minor  bards)  and  to  Byron,  but  has  little  value.  Barton  died 
in  1849. 

The  same  pair  of  enemies  joined  in  praising  Henry  Kirke  White, 
who  was  born  in  1785  and  died  when  barely  twenty-one.  Here 
indeed  Southey's  unsurpassed  biographical  skill  enforced  the 
poetaster's  merit  in  a  charming  Memoir,  which  assisted  White's 

1  Not  to  be  confounded  with  Robert,  or  "Satan"  Montgomery,  his  junior 
by  many  \cars,  and  a  much  worse  poet,  the  victim  of  Macaulay's  famous  classical 
example  of  what  is  called  in  English  "slating,"  and  in  French  <!rcintcment.  There 
is  really  nothing  to  be  said  about  this  person  that  Maeaulay  has  not  said  ;  though 
perhaps  one  or  two  of  the  things  he  has  said  are  a  little  strained. 


io8  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

rather  pathetic  story.  He  was  the  son  of  a  butcher,  a  diligent 
but  reluctant  lawyer's  clerk,  an  enthusiastic  student,  a  creditable 
undergraduate  at  St.  John's,  Cambridge,  and  a  victim  of  consumption. 
All  this  made  his  verse  for  a  time  popular.  But  he  really  deserved 
the  name  just  affixed  to  him:  he  was  a  poetaster,  and  nothing  more. 
The  "  genius  "  attributed  to  him  in  Byron's  well-known  and  noble 
though  rather  rhetorical  lines  may  be  discovered  on  an  average 
in  about  half  a  dozen  poets  during  any  two  or  three  years  of  any 
tolerable  poetic  period.  His  best  things  are  imitations  of  Cowper 
in  his  sacred  mood,  such  as  the  familiar  "Star  of  Bethlehem," 
and  even  these  are  generally  spoilt  by  some  feebleness  or  false 
note.  At  his  worst  he  is  not  far  from  Delia  Crusca.1 

In  the  same  year  with  Kirke  White  was  born  a  much  better 
poet,  and  a  much  robuster  person  in  all  ways,  mental  and  physical. 
Allan  Cunningham  was  a  Dumfriesshire  man  born  in  the  lowest 
rank,  and  apprenticed  to  a  stone-mason,  whence  in  after  years  he 
rose  to  be  Chantrey's  foreman.  Cunningham  began — following 
a  taste  very  rife  at  the  time — with  imitated,  or  to  speak  plainly, 
forged  ballads ;  but  the  merit  of  them  deserved  on  true  grounds 
the  recognition  they  obtained  on  false,  and  he  became  a  not  incon- 
siderable man  of  letters  of  all  work.  His  best  known  prose  work 
is  the  "  Lives  of  the  Painters."  In  verse  he  is  ranked,  as  a  song- 
writer in  Scots,  by  some  next  to  Burns,  and  by  few  lower  than 
Hogg.  Some  of  his  pieces,  such  as  "  Fair  shines  the  sun  in  France," 
have  the  real,  the  inexplicable,  the  irresistible  song -gift. 
Cunningham,  who  was  the  friend  of  many  good  men  and  was  liked 
by  all  of  them,  died  on  29th  October  1842.  His  elder  by  eleven 
years,  Robert  Tannahill,  who  was  born  in  1774  and  died  (prob- 
ably by  suicide)  in  1810,  deserves  a  few  lines  in  this  tale  of  Scots 
singers.  Tannahill,  like  Cunningham  in  humble  circumstances 
originally,  never  became  more  than  a  weaver.  His  verse  has  not 


1  A  good  m: 
"  miserable  pot1 
lines  and  nothir 
less  severe  (li'iu 
and  tin1  above  i 
A  good  young  i 


ny  years  ago,  in  a  little  book  on  Dryclen,  I  oall-'d  Kirke  White  a 
a>ter,"  and  was  rebuked  for  it  by  those  who  perhaps  knew  Byron's 
g  more.  Quite  recently  Mr.  ( iosse  \\  as  rebuked  inure  loudly  fora 
neiation.  I  determined  that  I  would  read  Kuke  \Yhitc  again, 
idgmciit  is  the  milde-t  I  ean  pnssiblv  pronounce  after  the  reading 
ian  \\ith  a  pathetic  cartel,  but  a  poetaster  merely. 


MINOR  POETS  109 


the  gusto  of  Allan  or  of  Hogg,  but  is  sweet  and  tender  enough. 
William  Motherwell,  too,  as  much  younger  than  Allan  as  Tannahill 
was  older  (he  was  born  in  1797  and  died  young  in  1835),  deserves 
mention,  and  may  best  receive  it  here.  He  was  a  Conservative 
journalist,  an  antiquary  of  some  mark,  and  a  useful  editor  of 
Minstrelsy.  Of  his  original  work,  "Jeanie  Morrison"  is  the  best 
known ;  and  those  who  have  read,  especially  if  they  have  read  it  in 
youth,  "The  Sword  Chant  of  Thorstein  Raudi,"  will  not  dismiss 
it  as  Wardour  Street ;  while  he  did  some  other  delightful  things. 
Earlier  (1812)  the  heroi-comic  Anster  Fair  si  William  Tennant 
(1784-1848)  received  very  high  and  deserved  no  low  praise; 
while  William  Thorn,  a  weaver  like  Tannahill,  who  was  a  year 
younger  than  Motherwell  and  lived  till  1848,  wrote  many  simple 
ballads  in  the  vernacular,  of  which  the  most  touching  are  perhaps 
"  The  Song  of  the  Forsaken  "  and  "  The  Mitherless  Bairn." 

To  return  to  England,  Bryan  Waller  Procter,  who  claimed 
kindred  with  the  poet  from  whom  he  took  his  second  name,  was 
born  in  1790,  went  to  Harrow,  and,  becoming  a  lawyer,  was  made 
a  Commissioner  of  Lunacy.  He  did  not  die  till  1874;  and  he, 
and  still  more  his  wife,  were  the  last  sources  of  direct  informa- 
tion about  the  great  race  of  the  first  third  of  the  century.  He 
was,  under  the  pseudonym  of  "  Barry  Cornwall,"  a  fluent  verse 
writer  of  the  so-called  Cockney  school,  and  had  not  a  little  reputa- 
tion, especially  for  songs  about  the  sea  and  things  in  general.  They 
still  occasionally,  from  critics  who  are  not  generally  under  the  bond- 
age of  traditional  opinion,  receive  high  praise,  which  the  present 
writer  is  totally  unable  to  echo.  A  loyal  junior  friend  to  Lamb,  a 
wise  and  kindly  senior  to  Beddoes,  liked  and  respected  by  many 
or  by  all,  Procter,  as  a  man,  must  always  deserve  respect.  If 

The  sea,  the  sea,  the  open  sea, 
The  blue,  the  fresh,  the  ever  free, 

and  things  like  it  are  poetry,  I  admit  myself,  with  a  sad  humility, 
to  be  wholly  destitute  of  poetical  appreciation. 

The    Church    of   England  contributed    two    admirable    verse 


THE  NEW  POETRY 


writers  of  this  period  in  Henry  Cary  and  Reginald  Heber.  Gary, 
who  was  horn  in  1772  and  was  a  Christ  Church  man,  was  long 
an  assistant  librarian  in  the  British  Museum.  His  famous  trans- 
lation of  the  Dirina  Commedia,  published  in  1814,  is  not  only  one 
of  the  best  verse  translations  in  English,  but,  after  the  lapse  of 
eighty  years,  during  which  the  study  of  Dante  has  been  constantly 
increasing  in  England,  in  which  poetic  ideas  have  changed  not 
a  little,  and  in  which  numerous  other  translations  have  appeared, 
still  attracts  admiration  from  all  competent  scholars  for  its  com- 
bination of  fidelity  and  vigour.  Heber,  born  in  i  783  and  educated 
at  Brascnose,  gained  the  Newdigate  will)  Palestine,  a  piece  which 
ranks  with  Timbuctoo  and  a  few  others  among  unforgotten  prize 
poems.  He  took  orders,  succeeding  to  the  family  living  of  Hodnet, 
and  for  some  years  bid  fair  to  be  one  of  the  most  shining  lights  of 
the  English  Church,  combining  admirable  parochial  work  with 
good  literature,  and  with  much  distinction  as  a  preacher.  Un- 
fortunately he  thought  it  his  duty  to  take  the  Bishopric  of 
Calcutta  when  it  was  offered  him  ;  and,  arriving  there  in  1824, 
worked  incessantly  for  nearly  two  years  and  then  died.  His 
/oiirnal  in  India  is  very  pleasant  reading,  and  some  of  his  hymns 
rank  with  the  best  in  English. 

Ebenezer  Elliott,  the  "Corn-Law  Rhymer,"  was  born  in  York- 
shire on  7th  March  1781.  His  father  was  a  clerk  in  an  iron- 
foundry.  He  himself  was  early  sent  to  foundry  work,  and  he 
afterwards  became  a  master-founder  at  Sheffield.  Lrom  different 
points  of  view  it  may  be  thought  a  palliation— and  the  reverse — 
of  the  extreme  virulence  with  which  Elliott  took  the  side  <>f  work- 
men against  landowners  and  men  of  property,  that  he  attained  to 
affluence  himself  as  an  employer,  and  \\as  never  in  the  least 
incommoded  by  the  "condition-of-England ''  question.  He  early 
displayed  a  considerable  affection  for  literature,  and  was  one,  and 
about  the  last,  of  the  prodigies  whom  Southey,  in  his  inexhaustible 
kindness  for  struggling  men  of  letters,  accepted  Manv  years 
later  the  Laureate  wrote  good-naturedly  to  U'ynn  :  "1  mean  to 
read  the  Corn-Law  Rhymer  a  lecture,  not  without  some  hope 


II  ELLIOTT  in 

that  as  I  taught  him  the  art  of  poetry  I  may  teach  him  something 
better."  The  "  something  better"  was  not  in  Elliott's  way ;  for  he 
is  a  violent  and  crude  thinker,  with  more  smoke  than  fire  in  his 
violence,  though  not  without  generosity  of  feeling  now  and  then,  and 
with  a  keen  admiration  of  the  scenery — still  beautiful  in  parts,  and 
then  exquisite — which  surrounded  the  smoky  Hades  of  Sheffield. 
He  himself  acknowledges  the  influence  of  Crabbe  and  disclaims 
that  of  Wordsworth,  from  which  the  cunning  may  anticipate  the 
fact  that  he  is  deeply  indebted  to  both.  His  earliest  publication 
or  at  least  composition,  "The  Vernal  Walk,"  is  said  to  date  from 
the  very  year  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  and  of  course  owes  no  royalty 
to  Wordsworth,  but  is  in  blank  verse,  a  sort  of  compound  of 
Thomson  and  Crabbe.  "  Love  "  (in  Crabbian  couplets  slightly 
tinged  with  overlapping)  and  "  The  Village  Patriarch  "  (still  smack- 
ing of  Crabbe  in  form,  though  irregularly  arranged  in  rhymed  deca- 
syllabics) are  his  chief  other  long  poems.  He  tried  dramas,  but  he 
is  best  known  by  his  "Corn-Law  Rhymes"  and  "Corn-Law  Hymns," 
and  deserves  to  be  best  known  by  a  few  lyrics  of  real  beauty,  and 
many  descriptions.  How  a  man  who  could  write  "  The  Wonders 
of  the  Lane  "  and  "  The  Dying  Boy  to  the  Sloe  Blossom  "  could 
stoop  to  malignant  drivel  about  "palaced  worms,"  "this  syllabub- 
throated  logician,"  and  so  forth,  is  strange  enough  to  understand, 
especially  as  he  had  no  excuse  of  personal  suffering.  Even  in 
longer  poems  the  mystery  is  renewed  in  "  They  Met  Again  "  and 
"  Withered  Wild  Flowers  "  compared  with  such  things  as  "  The 
Ranter,"  though  the  last  exhibits  the  author  at  both  his  best  and 
worst.  However,  Elliott  is  entitled  to  the  charity  he  did  not  show  ; 
and  the  author  of  such  clumsy  Billingsgate  as  "  Arthur  Bread-Tax 
Winner,"  "  Faminton,"  and  so  forth,  may  be  forgiven  for  the 
flashes  of  poetry  which  he  exhibits.  Even  in  his  political  poems 
they  do  not  always  desert  him,  and  his  somewhat  famous  Chartist 
(or  ante-Chartist)  "  Battle-Song "  is  as  right-noted  as  it  is  wrong- 
headed. 

Sir  Aubrey  de  Vere  (1788-1846),  a  poet  and  the  father  of  a 
poet  still  alive,  was  a  friend  and  follower  of  Wordsworth,  and  the 


H2  THE  NKW  POKTRY 


author  of  sonnets  good  in  the  Wordsworthian  kind.  But  he 
cannot  bo  spared  much  room  here ;  nor  can  much  even  be  given 
to  the  mild  shade  of  a  poetess  far  more  famous  in  her  day  than 
he.  "Time  that  breaks  all  things,"  according  to  the  dictum  of  a 
great  poet  still  living,  does  not  happily  break  all  in  literature; 
but  it  is  to  be  feared  that  he  has  reduced  to  fragments  the  once 
not  inconsiderable  fame  of  Felicia  Henians.  She  was  born  (her 
maiden  name  was  Felicia  Dorothea  Browne)  at  Liverpool  on 
25th  September  1794,  and  when  she  was  only  eighteen  she 
married  a  Captain  Hemans.  It  was  not  a  fortunate  union,  and  by 
far  the  greater  part  of  Mrs.  Hemans's  married  life  was  spent,  owing 
to  no  known  fault  of  hers,  apart  from  her  husband.  She  did  not 
live  to  old  age,  dying  on  26th  April  1835.  But  she  wrote  a  good 
deal  of  verse  meanwhile — plays,  poems,  "songs  of  the  affections," 
and  what  not.  Her  blameless  character  (she  wrote  chiefly  to 
support  her  children)  and  a  certain  ingenuous  tenderness  in  her 
verse,  saved  its  extreme  feebleness  from  severe  condemnation  in 
an  age  which  was  still  avid  of  verse  rather  than  discriminating  in 
it ;  and  children  still  learn  "  The  boy  stood  on  the  burning  deck," 
and  other  things.  It  is  impossible,  on  any  really  critical  scheme, 
to  allow  her  genius  ;  but  she  need  not  be  spoken  of  with  any 
elaborate  disrespect,  while  it  must  be  admitted  that  her  latest 
work  is  her  best  —  always  a  notable  sign.  "Despondency  and 
Aspiration,"  dating  from  her  death -year,  soars  close  to  real 
sublimity  ;  and  of  her  smaller  pieces  "  England's  Dead "  is  no 
vulgar  thing. 

Between  the  death  of  Byron  and  the  distinct  appearance  of 
Tennyson  and  the  Brownings  there  was  a  kind  of  interregnum  or 
twilight  of  poetry,  of  which  one  of  its  strangest  if  not  least  illumin- 
ative stars  or  meteors,  Beddoes,  has  given  a  graphic  but  uncom- 
plimentary picture  in  a  letter:  "owls'  light"  he  calls  it,  with 
adjuncts.  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Southey  :  Scott,  Campbell, 
and  Moore,  were  all  living,  but  the  poetic  production  of  all  had 
on  the  whole  ceased.  Shelley  and  Keats  would  have  been  in 
time  the  natural,  and  in  genius  the  more  than  sufficient  sun  and 


MINOR  POETS  113 


moon  of  the  time ;  but  they  had  died  before  Byron.  So  the 
firmament  was  occupied  by  rather  wandering  stars  :  some  of  them 
elders  already  noticed,  others  born  in  the  ten  or  twelve  years 
between  Keats  (1795)  and  the  eldest  of  the  Tennysons  (1807). 
The  chief  of  these  were  the  pair  of  half- serious,  half- humorous 
singers,  Hood  and  Praed.  Next  in  public  estimation  come 
Talfourd,  Hartley  Coleridge,  Macaulay,  Sir  Henry  Taylor,  the 
Irish  poet  Mangan,  R.  H.  Horne,  and  the  first  Lord  Lytton  ; 
while  a  third  class — of  critics'  rather  than  readers'  favourites — 
varying  in  merit,  but,  at  the  best  of  the  best  of  them,  ranking 
higher  than  any  of  the  above,  may  be  made  up  of  George 
Barley,  C.  J.  Wells,  the  Dorsetshire  poet  Barnes,  Beddoes, 
Charles  Whitehead,  R.  S.  Hawker,  and  Thomas  Wade.  To  the 
second  class  must  be  added  "L.  E.  L.,"  the  poetess  who  filled  the 
interval  between  Mrs.  Hemans  and  Mrs.  Browning. 

Wells,  Whitehead,  and  Wade  may  be  dismissed  without  dis- 
respect as,  if  not  critical  mares'-nests,  at  any  rate  critical  hobbies. 
Persons  of  more  or  less  distinction  (and  of  less  or  more  crotchet) 
have  at  different  times  paid  very  high  compliments  to  the  Joseph 
and  his  Brethren  (1823,  revised  later)  of  Charles  Jeremiah  Wells 
(1800-1879),  a  friend  of  Keats,  and  a  person  who  seems  to  have 
lived  much  as  he  pleased ;  to  the  Solitary  of  Charles  Whitehead 
(1804-1862),  a  Bohemian  ne'er-do-weel,  who  also  showed  talent 
as  a  novelist  and  miscellanist ;  and  to  the  Mundi  et  Cordis 
Carmina  (1835)  of  Thomas  Wade  (1805-1875),  a  playwright  and 
journalist.  Of  the  three,  Wade  appears  to  me  to  have  had  the 
greatest  poetical  talent.  But  I  do  not  think  that  any  one  who  on 
the  one  hand  uses  epithets  in  poetical  criticism  with  caution,  and 
on  the  other  has  read  a  great  deal  of  minor  poetry  as  it  appears, 
could  put  any  one  of  them  very  high.  All  were  born  late  enough 
to  breathe  the  atmosphere  of  the  new  poetry  young;  all  had 
poetical  velleities,  and  a  certain  amount,  if  not  of  originality,  of 
capacity  to  write  poetry.  But  they  were  not  poets ;  they  were 
only  poetical  curiosities. 

Darley,  Beddoes,  and  Horne  belong  in  the  main  to  the  same 

I 


H4  THE  NKW  POETRY  CHAP. 


class,  but  rise  high,  in  one  case  immeasurably,  above  them. 
George  Darlcy  (1795-1846)  is  perhaps  our  chief  English  example  of 
"the  poet  who  dies  in  youth  while  the  man  survives,"  and  who  be- 
comes a  critic.  In  him,  however,  the  generation  of  the  critic  did  not 
wait  for  the  corruption  of  the  poet.  An  Irishman,  and  of  Trinity 
College,  Dublin,  he  was  one  of  the  staff  of  the  London  Magazine, 
and  wrote  much  verse  bad  and  good,  including  the  once  famous 
"  I've  been  Roaming,"  of  which  it  is  safe  to  say  that  not  one  in 
ten  of  those  who  have  sung  it  could  tell  the  author.  His  best 
work  is  contained  in  the  charming  pastoral  drama  of  Sylvia  (1827) 
and  the  poem  entitled  Nepenthe  (1839).  He  was  a  good  but 
rather  a  savage  critic,  and  edited  Beaumont  and  Fletcher.  His 
work  has  never  been  collected,  nor,  it  is  believed,  ever  fully  pub- 
lished ;  and  it  has  the  marks  of  a  talent  that  never  did  what  was 
in  it  to  do,  and  came  at  an  unfortunate  time.  Some  not  bad 
judges  in  the  forties  ranked  Darley  with  Tennyson  in  poetic 
possibilities,  and  thought  the  former  the  more  promising  of  the 
two. 

Except  Donne,  there  is  perhaps  no  English  poet  more  difficult 
to  write  about,  so  as  to  preserve  the  due  pitch  of  enthusiasm  on 
the  one  hand  and  criticism  on  the  other,  than  Thomas  Lovell 
Heddoes,  born  at  Clifton  on  2oth  July  1803.  He  was  the  son 
of  a  very  famous  physician,  and  of  Anna  Edgeworth,  youngest 
sister  of  the  whole  blood  to  the  novelist.  Beddoes,  left  fatherless 
at  six  years  old,  was  educated  at  the  Charterhouse  and  at 
Pembroke  College,  Oxford,  and  when  he  was  barely  of  age  went 
to  Germany  to  study  medicine,  living  thenceforth  almost  entirely 
on  the  Continent.  Before  this  he  had  published  two  volumes, 
The  Improvisatore  and  TJic  Bride's  Tragedy ;  but  his  principal 
work  is  a  wild  Elizabethan  play  called  Death's  Jest-Book  ;  or,  the 
l-'ooFs  Tragedy,  which  he  never  absolutely  finished.  He  died  in 
1848  at  Basle  by  a  complicated  and  ghastly  kind  of  suicide 
Three  years  later  his  Poems  appeared,  and  they  have  been  recently 
republished,  with  additions  and  a  curious  collection  of  letters. 

Beddoes   has   sometimes    been   treated   as   a  mainly   bookish 


BEDDOES  115 


poet  deriving  from  the  Elizabethans  and  Shelley.  I  cannot  agree 
with  this.  His  very  earliest  work,  written  when  he  could  not 
know  much  either  of  Shelley  or  Keats,  shows  as  they  do 
technique  perhaps  caught  from  Leigh  Hunt.  But  this  is  quite 
dropped  later ;  and  his  Elizabethanism  is  not  imitation,  but  in- 
spiration. In  this  inspiration  he  does  not  follow,  but  shares  with 
his  greater  contemporaries.  He  is  a  younger  and  tragic  counter- 
part to  Charles  Lamb  in  the  intensity  with  which  he  has  imbibed 
the  Elizabethan  spirit,  rather  from  the  nightshade  of  Webster  and 
Tourneur  than  from  the  vine  of  Shakespeare.  As  wholes  his 
works  are  naught,  or  naught  but  nightmares,  though  Death's 
fest-Book,  despite  its  infinite  disadvantages  from  constant  rewriting 
and  uncertainty  of  final  form,  has  a  strong  grasp.  But  they 
contain  passages,  especially  lyrics,  of  the  most  exquisite  fancy  and 
music,  such  as  since  the  seventeenth  century  none  but  Blake  and 
Coleridge  had  given.  Beddoes  does  not  seem  to  have  been  at 
all  a  pleasant  person,  and  in  his  later  days  at  any  rate  he  would 
appear  to  have  been  a  good  deal  less  than  sane.  But  the  author 
of  such  things  as  the  "  Dirge  for  Wolfram  "  ("  If  thou  wilt  ease 
thine  heart")  in  Deattts  Jest- Book,  and  the  stanza  beginning 
"Dream -Pedlary,"  "If  there  were  dreams  to  sell,"  with  not  a  few 
others  of  the  same  kind,  attains  to  that  small  and  disputed — but 
not  to  those  who  have  thought  out  the  nature  of  poetry  disputable 
— class  of  poets  who,  including  Sappho,  Catullus,  some  mediaeval 
hymn-writers,  and  a  few  moderns,  especially  Coleridge,  have,  by 
virtue  of  fragments  only,  attained  a  higher  position  than  many 
authors  of  large,  substantive,  and  important  poems.  They 
may  be  shockingly  lacking  in  bulk,  in  organisation,  in  proper 
choice  of  subject,  in  intelligent  criticism  of  life,  but  they  are 
like  the  summer  lightning  or  the  northern  aurora,  which,  though 
they  shine  only  now  and  then,  and  only  it  may  be  for  a  few 
moments,  shine,  when  they  do  shine,  with  a  beauty  unapproach- 
able by  gas  or  candle,  hardly  approached  by  sun  or  moon,  and 
illuminate  the  whole  of  their  world. 

Although  quotation  is  in  the  main  impossible  in  this  book, 


n6  THE  NEW  POETRY 


Beddoes,  despite  the  efforts  of  his  friend  Kelsall,  of  Mr.  Swin- 
burne, of  Mr.  (losse  (thanks  to  whom  a  quasi-complete  edition 
has  at  last  appeared),  and  others,  is  still  so  little  known,  that  a 
short  one  may  be  allowed  in  his  case.  I  have  known  a  critic 
who  said  deliberately  of  the  above-mentioned  stanza  in  "  Dream- 
Pedlary  "- 

If  there  were  dreams  to  sell, 

What  would  you  buy  ? 
Some  cost  a  passing  hell, 

Some  a  light  sigh 

That  shakes  from  Life's  fresh  crown 
Only  a  roscleaf  down. 
If  there  were  dreams  to  sell  — 
Merry  and  sad  t</  tell 
And  the  crier  rung  the  bell, 

What  would  you  buy  ? 

that  these  ten  lines  contain  more  pure  poetry  than  the  entire 
works  of  Byron.  And  the  same  touch  will  be  found  not  merely 
in  the  "Wolfram  Dirge"  mentioned — 

If  thou  wilt  ease  thine  heart 
Of  Love  and  all  its  smart, 
Then  sleep,  dear,  sleep. 

But  wilt  thou  cure  thine  heart 
Of  Love  and  all  its  smart, 
Then  die,  dear,  die-— 

but  in  several  other  dirges  (for  the  dirge  is  the  form  natural  to 
Beddoes),  in  the  "  Song  from  Torrismond,"  in  "  Love  in  Idleness," 
in  the  "  Song  on  the  Water  ''  (which  is  pure  early  Tennyson),  in  the 
exquisite  "  Threnody,"  and  in  many  other  things.  They  have  been 
called  artificial :  the  epithet  can  be  allowed  in  no  other  sense 
than  in  that  in  which  it  applies  to  all  the  best  poetry.  And  they 
have  the  note,  which  only  a  few  true  but  imperfect  poets  have,  of 
anticipation.  Shadows  before,  both  of  Tennyson  and  Brown- 
ing, especially  of  the  latter,  appear  in  Beddoes.  But  after  all  his 
main  note  is  his  own — not  theirs,  not  the  Elizabethan,  not 
Shelley's,  not  another's.  And  this  is  what  makes  a  poet. 

As  Beddoes'  forte  lay  in   short  and   rather  uncanny  snatches, 


II  HORNE  117 

so  that  of  Richard  Hengist  Home  lay  in  sustained  and  dignified 
composition.  He  was  not  christened  Hengist  at  all,  but  Henry. 
He  had  a  curious  life.  In  youth  he  knew  Keats  and  Wells,  having 
been,  like  them,  at  the  private  school  of  Mr.  Clarke  at  Edmonton. 
He  went  to  Sandhurst  and  was  expelled  for  insubordination ; 
joined  the  Mexican  navy  in  the  war  of  liberation  ;  travelled  widely ; 
but  seemed  at  about  five -and -twenty  to  be  settling  down  to 
literature  and  journalism  in  England.  After  writing  various 
things,  he  produced  in  1837  the  fine  but  not  quite  "live"  plays 
of  Cosmo  de  Medici  and  The  Death  of  Marlowe,  and  in  1843 
the  famous  farthing  epic,  Orion,  which  was  literally  published 
at  a  farthing.  This  was  the  smallest  part  of  a  great  literary 
baggage  of  very  unequal  value.  In  1852  Home,  resuming  the 
life  of  adventure,  went  to  Australia,  served  in  the  gold  police,  and 
stayed  at  the  Antipodes  till  1869.  Then  he  came  home  again 
and  lived  for  fifteen  years  longer,  still  writing  almost  to  his  very 
death  on  i3th  March  1884. 

It  is  not  true  that  Orion  is  Home's  only  work  of  value ;  but  it 
is  so  much  better  than  anything  else  of  his,  and  so  characteristic 
of  him,  that  by  all  but  students  the  rest  may  be  neglected.  And 
it  is  an  example  of  the  melancholy  but  frequently  exemplified 
truth,  that  few  things  are  so  dangerous,  nay,  so  fatal  to  enduring 
literary  fame,  as  the  production  of  some  very  good  work  among  a 
mass  of,  if  not  exactly  rubbish,  yet  inferior  stuff.  I  do  not  think 
it  extravagant  to  say  that  if  Home  had  written  nothing  but  Orion, 
and  had  died  comparatively  young  after  writing  it,  he  would  have 
enjoyed  very  high  rank  among  English  poets.  For,  though 
doubtless  a  little  weighted  with  "  purpose,"  it  is  a  very  fine 
poem  indeed,  couched  in  a  strain  of  stately  and  not  second-hand 
blank  verse,  abounding  in  finished  and  effective  passages,  by  no 
means  destitute  of  force  and  meaning  as  a  whole,  and  mixing 
some  passion  with  more  than  some  real  satire.  But  the  rather 
childish  freak  of  its  first  publication  probably  did  it  no  good,  and 
it  is  quite  certain  that  the  author's  long  life  and  unflagging  pro- 
duction did  it  much  harm. 


u8  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

Of  the  other  persons  in  the  list  above,  Macaulay,  Hartley 
Coleridge,  and  I-ord  Lytton  are  mainly  something  else  than  poets, 
and  Talfourd,  as  a  dramatist,  will  also  be  noticed  elsewhere.  Barnes 
and  Hawker  were  both  clergymen  of  the  West  of  England:  the 
former  very  highly  ranked  by  some  for  his  studies  in  Dorset 
dialect;  the  latter  the  author  of  the  famous  "Song  of  the 
Western  Men  "  (long  thought  a  genuine  antique),  of  the  ex- 
quisite "  Queen  Gwennyvar's  Round,"  of  the  fine  "  Silent  Tower 
of  Bottreaux,"  of  some  beautiful  sonnets,  and  of  the  stately 
"  Quest  of  the  Sangreal."  Whether  James  Clarence  Mangan, 
whose  most  famous  poem  is  "  Dark  Rosalcen,"  a  musical  and 
mystic  celebration  of  the  charms  and  wrongs  of  Erin,  is  a  great 
poet  to  whom  Saxon  jealousy  has  refused  greatness  for  political 
reasons,  or  a  not  ungifted  but  not  consummately  distinguished 
singer  who  added  some  study  to  the  common  Irish  gift  of 
fluent,  melodious  verse-making,  is  a  question  best  solved  by  read- 
ing his  work  and  judging  for  the  reader's  self.  It  is  not  by  any 
sane  account  so  important  that  to  dismiss  it  thus  is  a  serious 
rifiuto,  and  it  is  probably  impossible  for  Irish  enthusiasm  and 
English  judgment  ever  to  agree  on  the  subject.  Of  "L.  E.  I..,"  Sir 
Henry  Taylor,  Hood,  and  Praed,  some  more  substantive  account 
must  be  given. 

Although  it  is  not  easy,  after  two  generations,  to  decide  such  a 
point  accurately,  it  is  probable  that  "  L.  E.  L."  was  the  most 
popular  of  all  the  writers  of  verse  who  made  any  mark  between 
the  death  of  Byron  in  1824  and  the  time  when  Tennyson  de- 
finitely asserted  himself  in  1842.  She  paid  for  this  popularity 
(which  was  earned  not  merely  by  her  verse,  but  by  a  pretty  face, 
an  odd  social  position,  and  a  sad  and  apparently,  though  it  seems 
not  really,  mysterious  end)  by  a  good  deal  of  slightly  unchivalrous 
satire  at  the  time  and  a  rather  swift  and  complete  oblivion  after- 
wards. She  was  born  (her  full  name  being  l.etitia  Elizabeth 
Landon)  in  London  on  141)1  August  1802,  and  was  fairly  well 
connected  and  educated.  William  Jerdan,  the  editor  of  the 
Literary  Gazette  (a  man  whose  name  constantly  occurs  in  the 


L.  E.   L. SIR    HENRY  TAYLOR  119 


literary  history  of  this  time,  though  he  has  left  no  special  work 
except  an  Autobiography},  was  a  friend  of  her  family,  and  she 
began  to  write  very  early,  producing  novels  and  criticisms  as  well 
as  verse  in  newspapers,  in  the  albums  and  Souvenirs  which  were 
such  a  feature  of  the  twenties  and  thirties,  and  in  independent 
volumes.  She  was  particularly  active  as  a  poet  about  1824-35, 
when  appeared  the  works  whose  titles — The  Improvisatore,  The 
Troubadour,  The  Golden  Violet — suggested  parodies  to  Thackeray. 
Her  best  novel  is  held  to  be  Ethel  Churchill,  published  in  1837 
Next  year  she  married  Mr.  Maclean,  the  Governor  of  Cape  Coast 
Castle;  and,  going  out  with  him  to  that  not  very  salubrious  clime, 
died  suddenly  in  about  two  months.  All  sorts  of  ill-natured 
suggestions  were  of  course  made ;  but  the  late  Colonel  Ellis,  the 
historian  of  the  colony,  seems  to  have  established  beyond  the 
possibility  of  doubt  that  she  accidentally  poisoned  herself  with 
prussic  acid,  which  she  used  to  take  for  spasms  of  the  heart. 

It  is  tolerably  exact,  and  it  is  not  harsh,  to  say  that  "L.  E.  L."  is 
a  Mrs.  Hemans  with  the  influence  of  Byron  added,  not  to  the 
extent  of  any  "impropriety,"  but  to  the  heightening  of  the 
romantic  tone  and  of  a  native  sentimentality.  Her  verse  is 
generally  musical  and  sweet :  it  is  only  sometimes  silly.  But  it 
is  too  often  characterised  by  what  can  but  be  called  the  "  gush  " 
which  seems  to  have  affected  all  the  poetesses  of  this  period 
except  Sara  Coleridge  (1802-50)  (who  has  some  verses  worthy 
of  even  her  name  in  Phantasmion,  her  only  independent  book), 
and  which  appears  in  very  large  measure  in  the  work  of  Mrs 
Browning. 

Sir  Henry  Taylor's  poetical  repute  illustrates  the  converse  of 
the  proposition  which  is  illustrated  by  that  of  Home.  It  is 
probable  that,  if  each  is  measured  by  his  best  things,  Orion  and 
Philip  Van  Artevelde,  Home  must  be  allowed  to  be  a  good  deal 
the  better  poet.  But  a  placid  official  life  enabled  Taylor  both  to 
gain  powerful  friends  and  to  devote  himself  to  literature  merely 
when  and  how  he  pleased.  And  so  he  has  burdened  his  baggage 
with  no  mere  hack-work.  He  was  indeed  a  singularly  lucky 


120  THE  NEW  POETRY  CHAP. 

person.  The  son  of  a  man  of  fair  family,  but  reduced  fortune, 
\ho  had  taken  to  farming,  Henry  Taylor  began  in  the  Navy. 
Hut  he  disliked  the  service  very  much,  and  either  obtained  or 
received  his  discharge  after  only  nine  months'  sea  life  as  a  mid- 
shipman during  the  year  1814.  Then  he  entered  the  public 
store-keeper's  department,  but  was  ousted  by  rearrangements  after 
four  years'  service.  These  beginnings  were  not  very  promising ; 
but  his  father  allowed  him  to  stay  quietly  at  home  till  by  pure 
luck  he  obtained  a  third  post  under  Government  in  the  Colonial 
Office.  This  he  held  for  nearly  fifty  years,  during  which  it  gave 
him  affluence  and  by  degrees  a  very  high  position,  and  left  him 
abundance  of  time  for  society  and  letters.  He  resigned  it  in 
1872,  and  died  on  27th  March  1886.  He  wrote  some  prose  of 
various  kinds,  and  just  before  his  death  published  a  pleasant 
autobiography.  But  his  literary  fame  rests  on  a  handful  of  plays 
and  poems,  all  of  them,  except  S/.  Clement's  Eve,  which  did  not 
appear  till  1862,  produced  at  leisurely  intervals  between  1827 
(Isaac  Comnenus)  and  1847  (The  Ere  of  the  Conquest  and  other 
poems).  The  intervening  works  were  Philip  Van  Artevelde  (his 
masterpiece,  1834),  Edwin  the  Fair  (1842),  some  minor  poems, 
and  the  romantic  comedy  of  A  Sicilian  Summer  (first  called  The 
Virgin  Widow},  which  was  published  with  St.  Clemen  fs  Eve.  He 
had  (as,  it  may  be  noted  curiously,  had  so  many  of  the  men  of 
the  transition  decade  in  which  he  was  born)  a  singular  though 
scanty  vein  of  original  lyric  snatch,  the  best  example  of  which  is 
perhaps  the  song  "  Quoth  tongue  of  neither  maid  nor  wife "  in 
Van  Artevelde  ;  but  his  chief  appeal  lay  in  a  very  careful  study 
of  character,  and  the  presentation  of  it  in  verse  less  icy  than 
Talfourd's  and  less  rhetorical  than  Milman's.  Yet  he  had,  unlike 
either  of  these,  very  little  direct  eye  to  the  stage,  and  therefore  is 
classed  here  as  a  poet  rather  than  as  a  dramatist.  There  is  always 
a  public  for  what  is  called  "thoughtful"  poetry,  and  Taylor's  is 
more  than  merely  thoughtful.  But  it  may  be  suspected  by 
observers  that  when  Robert  Browning  came  into  fashion  Henry 
Taylor  went  out.  Citations  of  /  'an  Artcveldc,  if  not  of  the  other 


II  HOOD  121 

pieces  (none  of  which  are  contemptible,  while  the  two  last,  inferior  in 
weight  to  their  predecessors,  show  advance  in  ease  and  grace),  are 
very  frequent  between  1835  and  1865:  rare,  I  think,  between  1865 
and  1895. 

And  so  we  come  at  last  to  the  twin  poets,  in  the  proper  sense 
humorous, — that  is  to  say,  jesting  with  serious  thoughts  behind, — 
of  the  first  division  of  this  class.  They  were  very  close  in  many 
ways — indeed  it  is  yet  a  moot  point  which  of  the  two  borrowed 
certain  rhythms  and  turns  of  word  and  verse  from  the  other,  or 
whether  both  hit  upon  these  independently.  But  their  careers 
were  curiously  different ;  and,  except  in  comparative  length  of  life 
(if  that  be  an  advantage),  Praed  was  luckier  than  his  comrade. 
Thomas  Hood,  who  was  slightly  the  elder,  was  born  in  1798  or 
1799  (for  both  dates  are  given)  in  the  Poultry,  his  father  being  a 
bookseller  and  publisher.  This  father  died,  not  in  good  circum- 
stances, when  the  son  was  a  boy,  and  Thomas,  after  receiving  some 
though  not  much  education,  became  first  a  merchant's  clerk  and 
then  an  engraver,  but  was  lucky  enough  to  enjoy  between  these 
uncongenial  pursuits  a  long  holiday,  owing  to  ill-health,  of  some 
three  years  in  Scotland.  It  was  in  1820  or  thereabouts  that  he 
fell  into  his  proper  vocation,  and,  as  sub-editor  of  the  London 
Magazine,  found  vent  for  his  own  talents  and  made  acquaintance 
with  most  of  its  famous  staff.  He  married,  wrote  some  of  his 
best  serious  poems  and  some  good  comic  work,  and  found  that 
while  the  former  were  neglected  the  latter  was  eagerly  welcomed. 
It  was  settled  that,  in  his  own  pathetic  pun,  he  was  to  be  "  a  lively 
Hood  for  a  livelihood"  thenceforward.  It  is  difficult  to  say  whether 
English  literature  lost  or  gained,  except  from  one  very  practical 
point  of  view ;  for  Hood  did  manage  to  live  after  a  fashion  by 
his  fun  as  he  certainly  could  not  have  lived  by  his  poetry.  He 
had,  however,  a  bare  pittance,  much  bad  health,  and  some  ex- 
tremely bad  luck,  which  for  a  time  made  him,  through  no  fault  of 
his  own,  an  exile.  His  last  five  years  were  again  spent  in 
England,  and  in  comparative,  though  very  comparative,  prosperity  ; 
for  he  was  editor  first  of  the  New  Monthly  Magazine,  then  of  a 


TIIK  NEW  POETRY 


magazine  of  his  own,  Hood's  Monthly,  and  not  long  before  his 
death  he  received  from  Sir  Robert  Peel  a  civil  list  pension  of 
£100  a  year.  The  death  was  due  to  consumption,  inherited  and 
long  valiantly  struggled  with. 

The  still  shorter  life  of  Winthrop  Mackworth  Praed,  on  the 
other  hand,  was  passed  under  sufficiently  favourable  stars.  He 
was  born  in  1802,  and  his  father,  Serjeant  Praed,  possessed 
property,  practice  at  the  bar,  and  official  position.  Praed  was 
sent  to  Eton,  where  he  became  a  pillar  of  the  famous  school 
magazine  The  Etonian,  and  thence  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
where  he  did  extremely  well,  made  the  acquaintance  of  Macaulay, 
and  wrote  in  Knighfs  Quarterly.  After  a  short  interval  of  tutor- 
ing and  reading  for  the  Bar  he  entered  Parliament  in  1830,  and 
remained  in  it  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  which  closed  on  i5th  July 
1839.  He  had  latterly  been  secretary  to  the  Board  of  Control, 
and  it  was  thought  that,  had  he  lived,  he  might  have  made  a  con- 
siderable political  reputation  both  as  speaker  and  administrator. 

The  almost  unchequered  sunshine  of  one  of  these  careers  and 
the  little  sun  and  much  shadow  of  the  other  have  left  traces — 
natural  though  less  than  might  be  supposed — of  difference  between 
the  produce  of  the  two  men  ;  but  perhaps  the  difference  is  less 
striking  than  the  resemblance.  That  Hood — obliged  to  write  for 
bread,  and  outliving  Praed  by  something  like  a  decade  at  the  two 
ends — wrote  a  great  deal  more  than  Praed  did  is  of  little  con- 
sequence, for  the  more  leisurely  writer  is  as  unequal  as  the  duty 
labourer.  Hood  had  the  deeper  and  stronger  genius  :  of  this 
there  is  no  doubt,  and  the  advantage  more  than  made  up  for 
Praed's  advantages  in  scholarship  and  in  social  standing  and 
accomplishment.  In  this  serious  work  of  Hood's  (Lyais  the 
Centaur,  The  Pica  of  the  Midsummer  Fairies,  The  Ji/m  Tree,  The. 
Haunted  J louse)  there  is  observable;— to  a  degree  never  surpassed 
by  any  of  the  poets  of  this  group  except  Beddoes,  and  more  sustained 
and  human,  though  less  weird  and  sweet,  than  his — a  strain  of  the 
true,  the  real,  the  ineffable  tone  of  poetry  proper.  At  this  Praed 
never  arrives  :  there  are  at  most  in  him  touches  which  may  seem 


ii  PRAED  123 

to  a  very  charitable  judgment  to  show  that  in  other  circumstances 
sorrow,  passion,  or  the  like  might  have  roused  him  to  display  the 
hidden  fire.  On  the  other  hand  neither  Hood's  breeding,  nor,  I 
think,  his  nature,  allowed  him  to  display  the  exquisite  airiness,  the 
delicate  artificial  bloom  and  perfection,  of  Praed's  best  vers  de 
societe — the  Season,  the  Letter  of  Advice,  and  the  rest.  This  last 
bloom  has  never  been  quite  equalled — even  Prior's  touch  is  coarse 
to  it,  even  that  of  the  late  Mr.  Locker  is  laboured  and  deliberate. 
So  too  as  there  is  nothing  in  Praed  of  the  popular  indignation — 
generous  and  fine,  but  a  little  theatrical — which  endears  Hood  to 
the  general  in  The  Bridge  of  Sighs  and  The  Song  of  the  Shirt,  so 
there  is  nothing  in  Hood  of  the  sound  political  sense  underlying 
apparent  banter,  of  Praed's  Speaker  Asleep  and  other  things. 

But  where  the  two  poets  come  together,  on  a  ground  which 
they  have  almost  to  themselves,  is  in  a  certain  kind  of  humorous 
poetry  ranging  from  the  terrific-grotesque,  as  in  Hood's  Miss 
Kilmansegg  and  Praed's  Red  Fisherman,  to  the  simple,  humor- 
ously tender  study  of  characters,  as  in  a  hundred  things  of  Hood's, 
and  in  not  a  few  of  Praed's  with  The  Vicar  at  their  head.  The 
resemblance  here  is  less  in  special  points  than  in  a  certain  general 
view  of  life,  conditioned  in  each  case  by  the  poet's  breeding, 
temperament,  and  circumstance,  but  alike  in  essence  and  quality : 
in  a  certain  variety  of  the  essentially  English  fashion  of  taking 
life  with  a  mixture  of  jest  and  earnest,  of  humour  and  sentiment. 
Hood,  partly  influenced  by  the  need  of  caring  for  the  public, 
partly  by  his  pupilship  to  Lamb,  perhaps  went  to  farther  extremes 
both  in  mere  fun  and  in  mere  sentiment  than  Praed  did,  but  the 
central  substance  is  the  same  in  both. 

Yet  one  gift  which  Hood  has  and  Praed  has  not  remains  to  be 
noticed — the  gift  of  exquisite  song-writing.  Compared  with  the 
admired  inanities  of  Barry  Cornwall,  his  praised  contemporary, 
Hood's  "Fair  Ines,"  his  "Time  of  Roses,"  his  exquisite  "Last 
Stanzas,"  and  not  a  few  other  things,  are  as  gold  to  gilt  copper. 
Praed  has  nothing  to  show  against  these ;  but  he,  like  Hood,  was 
no  inconsiderable  prose  writer,  while  the  latter,  thanks  to  his 


124  THK  NKW  POETRY 


apprenticeship  to  the  burine,  had  an  extraordinary  faculty  of  illus- 
trating his  own  work  with  cuts,  contrary  to  all  the  canons,  but 
inimitably  grotesque. 

It  is  probable  that  even  in  this  long  survey  of  the  great 
poetical  production  of  the  first  third  of  this  century  some  gaps 
may  be  detected  by  specialists.  But  it  seemed  to  me  impossible 
to  give  more  than  the  barest  mention  here  to  the  "  single-speech  " 
accident  of  Charles  Wolfe,  the  author  of  the  "  Burial  of  Sir  John 
Moore,"  which  everybody  knows,  and  of  absolutely  nothing  else 
that  is  worth  a  single  person's  knowing ;  to  the  gigantic  and 
impossible  labours  of  Edwin  Atherstone ;  to  the  industrious 
translation  of  Rose  and  Sotheby  ;  to  the  decent  worth  of  Caroline 
Bowles,  and  the  Hood-and-water  of  Laman  Blanchard.  And 
there  are  others,  perhaps,  who  cannot  be  even  mentioned  ;  for 
there  must  be  an  end. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE    NEW    FICTION 

ALTHOUGH,  as  was  shown  in  the  first  chapter,  the  amount  of  novel- 
writing  in  the  last  decades  of  the  eighteenth  century  was  very 
considerable,  and  the  talent  displayed  by  at  least  some  of  the 
practitioners  of  the  form  distinctly  great,  it  can  hardly  have  been 
possible  for  any  careful  observer  of  it,  either  during  the  last  ten 
years  of  the  old  age  or  the  first  fifteen  of  the  new,  to  be  satisfied 
with  it  on  the  whole,  or  to  think  that  it  had  reached  a  settled  or 
even  a  promising  condition.  Miss  Burney  (now  Madame  d'Arblay), 
whose  brilliant  debut  with  Evelina  was  made  just  before  the  date 
at  which  this  book  begins,  had  just  after  that  date  produced 
Cecilia,  in  which  partial  and  contemporary  judges  professed  to 
see  no  falling  off.  But  though  she  was  still  living  and  writing, 
— though  she  lived  and  wrote  till  the  present  century  was  nearly 
half  over, —  Camilla  (1796)  was  acknowledged  as  a  doubtful 
success,  and  The  Wanderer  (1814)  as  a  disastrous  failure;  noi 
after  this  did  she  attempt  the  style  again. 

The  unpopularity  of  Jacobinism  and  the  growing  distaste  for 
the  philosophy  of  the  eighteenth  century  prevented  much  attempt 
being  made  to  follow  up  the  half  political,  half  philosophical  novel 
of  Godwin,  Holcroft,  and  Bage.  No  such  causes,  however,  were  in 
operation  as  concerning  the  "  Tale  of  Terror,"  the  second  founder 
of  which,  Monk  Lewis,  was  indeed  no  inconsiderable  figure  during 
the  earlier  part  of  the  great  age  of  1810-30,  while  Charles  Robert 
Maturin  improved  considerably  upon  Lewis  himself.  Maturin 


126  THE  NEW  FICTION 


was  horn  in  Ireland  (where  he  principally  lived)  in  1782,  and  died 
there  in  1824.  He  took  orders,  but  was  too  eccentric  for  success 
in  his  profession,  and  his  whole  heart  was  set  on  literature  and 
the  drama.  Befriended  by  Scott  and  Byron,  though  very  severely 
criticised  by  Coleridge,  he  succeeded  in  getting  his  tragedy  of 
Bertram  acted  at  Drury  Lane  with  success;  but  his  later 
theatrical  ventures  (Manuel,  Fredolpho]  were  less  fortunate.  He 
also  published  sermons ;  but  he  lives  in  literature  only  by  his 
novels,  and  not  very  securely  by  these.  He  produced  three  of 
them  —  The  Fatal  Vengeance ;  or,  T)ie  Family  of  Montorio,  The 
Wild  Irish  Boy,  and  the  Milesian  Chief- — under  a  pseudonym 
before  he  was  thirty ;  while  after  the  success  of  Bertram  he 
avowed  Women  (1818),  Mdmoth  the  Wanderer  (1820),  and  The 
Albigenses  (1824),  the  last  in  a  sort  of  cross  style  between  his  earlier 
patterns  and  Scott.  But  his  fame  had  best  be  allowed  to  rest 
wholly  on  Melmoth,  a  remarkable  book  dealing  with  the  supposed 
selling  of  a  soul  to  the  devil  in  return  for  prolonged  life ;  the 
bargain,  however,  being  terminable  if  the  seller  can  induce  some 
one  else  to  take  it  off  his  hands.  Although  far  too  long, 
marvellously  involved  with  tales  within  tales,  and  disfigured  in 
parts  by  the  rant  and  the  gush  of  its  class,  Melmoth  is  really 
a  powerful  book,  which  gave  something  more  than  a  passing 
shudder  to  its  own  generation  (it  specially  influenced  Balzac), 
and  which  has  not  lost  its  force  even  now.  But  the  usual  novel 
of  this  kind,  which  was  written  in  vast  numbers,  was  simply 
beneath  contempt. 

The  exquisite  artist  who,  as  mentioned  formerly,  had  taken 
these  tales  of  terror  as  part  subject  of  her  youthful  satire,  had 
begun  to  write  some  years  before  the  close  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  But  Miss  Austen's  books  were  long  withheld  from  the 
press,  and  were  considerably  preceded  in  publication  by  Maria 
Kdgeworth's.  These  last  are  the  only  novels  of  the  first  de- 
cade of  the  nineteenth  century  which  have  held  any  ground, 
though  they  were  but  few  among  the  crowds  not  merely  of  tales 
of  terror  but  of  fashionable  novels,  "  Minerva  Press  "  inanities. 


in  MISS    EDGEWORTH  127 

attempts  in  the  bastard  and  unsuccessful  kind  of  historical  romance 
which  preceded  Scott's,  and  others.  Miss  Edgeworth,  who  was 
born  in  1767,  the  daughter  of  an  eccentric  busybody  of  good 
family  and  property  in  Ireland,  and  who  lived  till  1848,  had  a 
great  fame  in  her  own  day,  deserved  it,  never  entirely  lost  it, 
and  has  lately  had  it  revived ;  while  Scott  declared  (but  in  such 
matters  Scott  was  a  little  apt  to  let  his  good -nature  and  his 
freedom  from  personal  vanity  get  the  better  of  strict  critical  truth) 
that  her  Irish  novels  had  supplied  the  suggestion  of  his  Scotch 
ones.  Her  chief  works  in  this  kind  were  Castle  Rackrent  (1801), 
a  book  with  little  interest  of  the  strictly  "  novel "  kind,  but 
a  wonderful  picture  of  the  varieties  of  recklessness  and  miscon- 
duct which  in  the  course  of  a  generation  or  two  ruined  or  crippled 
most  of  the  landlords  of  Ireland;  Belinda  (1803),  her  most 
ambitious  and  elaborate  if  not  her  most  successful  effort,  which 
includes  a  very  vivid  and  pregnant  sketch  of  the  feminine  dissipa- 
tion of  the  end  of  the  last  century ;  Tales  of  Fashionable  Life, 
including  the  admirable  Absentee  ;  and  Ormond,  the  most  vivid  of 
her  Irish  stories  next  to  Castle  Rackrent.  She  continued  to  write 
novels  as  late  as  1834  (Helen),  while  some  very  charming  letters 
of  hers,  though  privately  printed  a  good  many  years  ago,  were 
not  published  till  1894.  Miss  Edgeworth's  father,  Richard,  was 
himself  something  of  a  man  of  letters,  and  belonged  to  the  class 
of  Englishmen  who,  without  imbibing  French  freethinking,  had 
eagerly  embraced  the  "  utility  "  doctrines,  the  political  economy, 
and  some  of  the  educational  and  social  crazes  of  the  French 
philosophes ;  and  he  did  his  daughter  no  good  by  thrusting  into 
her  earlier  work  a  strain  of  his  own  crotchet  and  purpose.  In- 
directly, however,  this  brought  about  in  The  Parent's  Assistant,  in 
other  books  for  children,  and  in  the  Moral  Tales,  some  of  her  most 
delightful  work.  In  the  novels  (which  besides  those  mentioned 
include  Leonora,  Harrington,  Ennui,  and  Patronage,  the  longest  of 
all)  Miss  Edgeworth  occupies  a  kind  of  middle  position  between 
the  eighteenth  century  novelists,  of  whom  Miss  Burney  is  the  last, 
and  those  of  the  nineteenth,  of  whom  Miss  Austen  is  the  first. 


128  THE  NEW  FICTION 


This  is  not  merely,  though  no  doubt  it  is  partly,  due  to  the  fact 
that  the  society  which  she  saw  (and  she  mixed  in  a  great  deal,  from 
the  highest  downwards)  was  itself  in  a  kind  of  transition  state :  it 
was  at  least  as  much  owing  to  a  certain  want  of  distinct  modern- 
ness  and  distinct  universality  in  her  own  character,  thought,  and 
style.  Miss  Kdgeworth,  though  possessed  of  delightful  talents 
falling  little  short  of  genius,  and  of  much  humour  (which  last  is 
shown  in  the  charming  Essay  on  Irisli  Jlulls,  as  well  as  in  her 
novels  and  her  letters),  missed,  as  a  rule,  the  last  and  greatest 
touches ;  and,  except  some  of  her  Irish  characters,  who  are  rather 
types  than  individuals,  she  has  not  created  many  live  persons, 
while  sometimes  she  wanders  very  far  from  life.  Her  touch,  in 
short,  though  extremely  pleasant,  was  rather  uncertain.  She  can 
tell  a  story  to  perfection,  but  does  not  often  invent  it  perfectly ; 
and  by  herself  she  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  originated  anything, 
though  of  course,  if  we  could  accept  the  above-quoted  statement 
of  Scott's,  she  indirectly  originated  a  very  great  deal. 

Very  different  is  the  position  occupied  by  Jane  Austen,  who 
was  born  at  Steventon  in  Hampshire  on  i6th  December  1775, 
being  the  daughter  of  the  rector  of  that  place,  lived  a  quiet  life 
chiefly  at  various  places  in  her  native  county,  frequented  good 
society  in  the  rank  of  not  the  richest  country  squires,  to  which 
her  own  family  belonged,  and  died  at  Winchester  unmarried  on 
24th  July  1817.  Of  her  six  completed  novels,  Sense  and 
Sensibility,  Pride  and  Prejudice,  Mansfield  Park,  and  Emma  were 
published  during  the  last  seven  years  of  her  life,  while  Xorthangcr 
Abbev  and  Persuasion  appeared,  for  the  first  time  with  an  author's 
name,  the  year  after  her  death.  They  had  no  enormous  or 
sudden  popularity,  but  the  best  judges,  from  Scott  downwards, 
at  once  recognised  their  extraordinary  merit  ;  and  it  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  by  the  be>t  judges,  with  rare  exceptions,  that 
merit  has  been  acknowledged  with  ever  increasing  fulness  at 
once  of  enthusiasm  and  discrimination  to  the  present  day.  With 
Scott,  Miss  Austen  is  the  parent  of  nineteenth  century  fiction  ; 
or,  to  speak  with  greater  exactness,  she  is  the  mother  of  the 


in  MISS    AUSTEN  129 

nineteenth  century  novel,  just  as  he  is  the  father  of  the  nineteenth 
century  romance. 

One  indeed  of  the  most  wonderful  things  about  her  is  her 
earliness.  Even  the  dates  of  publication  of  her  first  books 
precede  those  of  any  novelist  of  the  same  rank  and  the  same 
modernity;  but  these  dates  are  misleading.  Northanger  Abbey 
was  written  more  than  twenty  years  before  it  appeared,  and  the 
bulk  of  Pride  and  Prejudice  (which  some  hold  to  be  the  best 
and  most  characteristic  of  all)  is  known  to  have  been  as  old  at 
least  as  Northanger  Abbey.  That  is  to  say,  almost  at  the  very 
time  of  the  appearance  of  Camilla  (to  which,  by  the  way,  Miss 
Austen  was  an  original  subscriber),  a  book  not  strikingly  more 
nineteenth  century  in  tone  than  the  novels  of  Richardscn,  though 
a  little  more  so  in  manners,  a  girl  even  younger  than  Miss 
Burney  herself  had  been  when  she  wrote  Evelina  was  drawing 
other  girls,  who,  putting  aside  the  most  trivial  details  of  dress, 
speech,  and  so  forth,  might  be  living  girls  to-day. 

The  charm  and  the  genius  of  Miss  Austen  are  not  universally 
admitted ;  the  touch  of  old  fashion  in  external  detail  apparently 
discontenting  some  readers,  the  delicate  and  ever-present  irony 
either  escaping  or  being  distasteful  to  others,  while  the  extreme 
quietness  of  the  action  and  the  entire  absence  of  excitement 
probably  revolt  a  third  class.  But  the  decriers  do  not  usually 
attempt  formal  criticism.  However,  they  sometimes  do,  and 
such  an  attempt  once  came  under  the  notice  of  the  present 
historian.  It  was  urged  that  to  extol  Miss  Austen's  method  is 
a  masculine  delusion,  that  method  being  nothing  but  the 
throwing  into  literature  of  the  habit  of  minute  and  semi-satiric 
observation  natural  to  womankind.  It  did  not  apparently  occur 
to  this  critic  that  he  (or  she)  was  in  the  first  place  paying  Miss 
Austen  an  extraordinarily  high  compliment — a  compliment  almost 
greater  than  the  most  enthusiastic  "Janites"  have  ventured — 
inasmuch  as  no  higher  literary  triumph  can  be  even  conceived 
than  thus  to  focus,  formulate,  and  crystallise  the  special  talent 
and  gift  of  an  entire  sex  into  a  literary  method.  Nor  did  it 

K 


I3o 


THE  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 


probably  occur  to  him  that  he  was  laying  himself  open  to  the 
damaging,  or  rather  ruinous  retort,  "Then  how  is  it  that,  of 
all  the  women  who  have  preceded  and  followed  Miss  Austen 
as  novelists,  no  other  has  displayed  this  specially  and  universally 
feminine  gift  ?  " 

It  is  no  doubt  true  that  there  is  something  feminine  about 
the  method,  which,  with  the  addition  of  a  certain  nescio  quid, 
giving  it  its  modern  difference,  may  be  said  to  combine  the 
peculiarities  of  Fielding  and  of  Richardson,  though  it  works  on 
a  much  smaller  scale  than  either.  It  has  the  intense  and  per- 
vading, though  not  the  exuberant  and  full-blooded,  livingness  of 
Fielding,  and  it  also  has  something  not  unlike  a  feminine 
counterpart  and  complement  of  his  pervading  irony  ;  while  it 
is  not  unlike  Richardson  in  building  up  the  characters  and  the 
stories  partly  by  an  infinity  of  tiny  strokes  of  detail,  often 
communicated  in  conversation,  partly  by  the  use  of  an  exceedingly 
nice  and  delicate  analysis  of  motive  and  temperament.  It  is 
in  the  former  respect  that  Miss  Austen  stands  apart  from  most, 
if  not  from  all,  women  who  have  written  novels.  Irony  is  by  no 
means  a  frequent  feminine  gift ;  and  as  women  do  not  often 
possess  it  in  any  great  degree,  so  they  do  not  as  a  rule  enjoy  it. 
Miss  Austen  is  only  inferior  among  English  writers  to  Swift,  to 
Fielding,  and  to  Thackeray — even  if  it  be  not  improper  to  use 
the  term  inferiority  at  all  for  what  is  after  all  not  much  more 
than  difference  —  in  the  use  of  this  potent  but  most  double 
edged  weapon.  Her  irony,  indeed,  is  so  subtle  that  it  requires 
a  certain  dose  of  subtlety  to  appreciate  it,  and  it  is  not  uncommon 
to  find  those  who  consider  such  personages  as  Mr.  Collins  in 
Pride  and  Prejudice  as  being  merely  farcical,  instead  of,  as  they 
are  in  fact,  creatures  of  the  highest  and  most  Shakespearian 
comedy.  But  there  would  be  no  room  here  to  examine  Miss 
Austen's  perfections  in  detail ;  the  important  tiling  for  the  pur- 
poses of  this  history  is  to  observe  again  that  she  "set  the  clock," 
so  to  speak,  of  pure  novel-writing  to  the  time  which  was  to  be 
nineteenth  century  time  to  this  present  hour.  She  discarded 


Ill  SCOTT'S    NOVELS  131 

violent  and  romantic  adventure.  She  did  not  rely  in  the  very 
least  degree  on  describing  popular  or  passing  fashions,  amuse- 
ments, politics,  but  confined  herself  to  the  most  strictly  ordinary 
life.  Yet  she  managed  in  some  fashion  so  to  extract  the 
characteristics  of  that  life  which  are  perennial  and  human,  that 
there  never  can  be  any  doubt  of  fit  readers  in  any  age  finding 
themselves  at  home  with  her,  just  as  they  find  themselves  at 
home  with  all  the*  greatest  writers  of  bygone  ages.  And  lastly, 
by  some  analogous  process  she  hit  upon  a  style  which,  though 
again  true  to  the  ordinary  speech  of  her  own  day,  and  therefore 
now  reviled  as  "  stilted  "  and  formal  by  those  who  have  not  the 
gift  of  literary  detachment,  again  possesses  the  universal  quality, 
and,  save  in  the  merest  externals,  is  neither  ancient  nor 
modern. 

For  the  moment,  however,  Miss  Austen's  example  had  not 
so  much  little  influence  as  none  at  all.  A  more  powerful  and 
popular  force,  coming  immediately  afterwards  and  coinciding  with 
the  bent  of  general  taste,  threw  for  the  time  the  whole  current 
of  English  novel-writing  into  quite  a  different  channel ;  and  it 
was  not  till  the  first  rush  of  this  current  had  expended  itself, 
after  an  interval  of  thirty  or  forty  years,  that  the  novel,  as 
distinguished  from  the  romance  and  from  nondescript  styles 
partaking  now  of  the  romance  itself,  now  of  something  like  the 
eighteenth  century  story,  engaged  the  popular  ear.  This  new 
development  was  the  historical  novel  proper,  and  the  hand  that 
started  it  at  last  was  that  of  Scott.  At  last— for  both  men  and 
women  had  been  trying  to  write  historical  novels  for  about  two 
thousand  years,  and  for  some  twenty  or  thirty  the  attempts  had 
come  tolerably  thick  and  fast.  But  before  Scott  no  one,  ancient  or 
modern,  Englishman  or  foreigner,  had  really  succeeded.  In  the 
first  place,  until  the  eighteenth  century  was  pretty  far  advanced, 
the  conception  and  the  knowledge  of  history,  as  distinguished 
from  the  mere  writing  and  reading  of  chronicles,  had  been  in  a 
very  rudimentary  condition.  Exceedingly  few  historians  and  no 
readers  of  history,  as  a  class  and  as  a  rule,  had  practised  or 


132  THE  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 

acquired  the  art  of  looking  at  bygone  ages  with  any  attempt  to 
realise  and  revive  the  ideas  of  those  ages  themselves,  or  even, 
while  looking  at  them  with  the  eyes  of  the  present,  to  keep  in 
mind  that  these  were  quite  different  eyes  from  those  of  con- 
temporaries. In  the  same  way  no  attempt  at  getting  "local 
colour,"  at  appropriateness  of  dialect,  and  so  forth,  had  been  made. 
These  negligences  in  the  hands  of  genius  had  been  as  unim- 
portant as  the  negligences  of  genius  always  are.  If  Shakespeare's 
"godlike  Romans"  are  not  entirely  free  from  anachronism, 
nobody  of  sense  would  exchange  them  for  anything  else  than 
themselves ;  and  though  Dante  practically  repeated  in  the 
Commedia  the  curious  confusion  which  in  less  gifted  trouveres 
and  romancers  mixed  up  Alexander  with  Charlemagne,  and 
olended  Greek  and  Gothic  notions  in  one  inextricable  tangle, 
this  also  was  supremely  unimportant,  if  not  even  in  a  manner 
interesting.  But  when,  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
writers,  of  secondary  powers  at  best,  engaging  in  a  new  and 
unengineered  way,  endeavoured  to  write  historical  novels,  they 
all,  from  Godwin  and  Mrs.  Radcliffe  to  Miss  Reeve  and 
the  Misses  Lee,  made  the  merest  gallimaufries  of  inaccurate 
history,  questionable  fiction,  manners  heedlessly  jumbled,  and 
above  all  dialogue  destitute  of  the  slightest  semblance  of  veri- 
similitude, and  drawn  chiefly  from  that  of  the  decadent  tragic 
and  comic  drama  of  the  time. 

It  is  not  possible— it  never  is  in  such  cases — to  give  a  very 
exact  account  of  the  causes  which  led  Walter  Scott,  when  the 
public  seemed  to  be  a  little  tiring  of  the  verse-romances  which 
have  been  discussed  in  the  last  chapter,  to  take  to  romances  in 
prose.  The  example  of  Miss  Edgeworth,  if  a  true  cause  at  all, 
could  affect  only  his  selection  of  Scotch  manners  to  illustrate 
his  histories,  not  his  adoption  of  the  historical  style  itself.  But 
he  did  adopt  it  ;  and,  fishing  out  from  an  old  desk  the  beginnings 
of  a  story  which  he  had  left  unfinished,  or  rather  had  scarce 
commenced,  years  earlier,  he  fashioned  it  into  IVarcrlev,  This, 
appearing  in  the  year  1814  at  a  serious  crisis  in  his  own  affairs, 


SCOTT'S    NOVELS  133 


opened  at  once  a  new  career  of  fame  and  fortune  to  him,  and  a 
previously  unknown  field  of  exploit  and  popularity  to  the  English 
novel. 

The  extraordinary  greatness  of  Scott — who  in  everything  but 
pure  style,  and  the  expression  of  the  highest  raptures  of  love, 
thought,  and  nature,  ranks  with  the  greatest  writers  of  the  world — 
is  not  better  indicated  by  any  single  fact  than  by  the  fact  that  it 
is  impossible  to  describe  his  novels  in  any  simple  formula.  He 
practically  created  the  historical  novel ;  and,  what  is  more,  he 
elaborated  it  to  such  an  extent  that  no  really  important  additions 
to  his  scheme  have  been  made  since.  But  not  all  his  novels  are 
historical.  The  two  which  immediately  succeeded  Waverky,  and 
which  perhaps  the  best  judges  consider  his  best, — Guy  Mannering 
and  The  Antiquary, — have  only  the  faintest  touch  of  history  about 
them,  and  might  have  none  at  all  without  affecting  their  excel- 
lence ;  while  one  of  the  most  powerful  of  his  later  books,  St. 
Ronarts  Well,  is  almost  absolutely  virgin  of  fact.  So  also,  though 
his  incomparable  delineation  of  national  manners,  speech,  and 
character,  of  the  cosas  de  Escbda  generally,  is  one  of  the  principal 
sources  of  his  interest,  Ivanhoe,  which  has  perhaps  been  the  most 
popular  of  all  his  books,  Kenilworth,  which  is  not  far  below  it 
in  popularity  or  in  merit,  and  one  or  two  others,  have  nothing  at 
all  of  Scotland  in  them ;  and  the  altogether  admirable  romance  of 
Quentin  Durward,  one  of  his  four  or  five  masterpieces,  so  little 
that  what  there  is  plays  the  smallest  part  in  the  success.  So  yet 
again,  historical  novelist  as  Scott  is,  and  admirably  as  he  has 
utilised  and  revivified  history,  he  is  by  no  means  an  extremely 
accurate  historical  scholar,  and  is  wont  not  merely  to  play  tricks 
with  history  to  suit  his  story, — that  is  probably  always  allowable, — 
but  to  commit  anachronisms  which  are  quite  unnecessary  and 
even  a  little  teasing. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  the  single  gift  underlying  all  these 
and  other  things — the  gift  which  enabled  Scott  not  merely,  as  has 
been  said,  to  create  the  historical  novel,  but  to  give  the  novel 
generally  an  entirely  new  start  and  direction,  to  establish  its 


134  THF.  NF.W  FICTION  CHAP 

popularity,  to  clear  its  reputation  from  the  smirch  of  frivolity  on 
the  one  side  and  immorality  on  the  other,  to  put  it  in  the  position 
occupied  at  other  times  or  in  other  countries  by  the  drama  and 
the  sermon,  and  to  make  it  a  rival  of  the  very  newspaper  which 
was  being  Kcfashioned  at  the  same  moment,  while  providing 
opportunities  for  the  production  of  literature  proper  not  inferior 
to  those  of  any  literary  kind  except  poetry — that  this  was  a  gift  of 
higher  scope,  if  of  vaguer  definition,  than  any  of  those  referred 
to.  It  was  that  gift  which  no  one  except  Shakespeare  has  ever 
possessed  in  larger  measure,  though  others  have  possessed  it  in 
greater  partial  intensity  and  perfection — the  gift  of  communicating 
life  to  the  persons,  the  story,  the  dialogue.  To  some  extent  Scott 
had  this  treasure  in  an  earthen  vessel.  He  could  not,  like 
Thackeray,  like  Fielding,  like  Miss  Austen  even,  make  everybody 
that  he  touched  alive  :  his  heroes  very  generally  are  examples  to 
the  contrary.  And  as  a  rule,  when  he  did  perform  this  function 
of  the  wizard, — a  name  given  to  him  by  a  more  than  popular 
appropriateness, — he  usually  did  it,  not  by  the  accumulation  of  a 
vast  number  of  small  strokes,  but  by  throwing  on  the  canvas,  or 
rather  panel,  large  outlines,  free  sweeps  of  line,  and  breadths 
of  colour,  instinct  with  vivacity  and  movement.  Yet  he  managed 
wholly  to  avoid  that  fault  of  some  creative  imaginations  which 
consists  in  personifying  and  individualising  their  figures  by  some 
easily  recognisable  label  of  mannerism.  Even  his  most  mannered 
characters,  his  humorists  in  the  seventeenth  century  sense,  of 
whom  Dugald  Dalgetty  is  the  prince  and  chief — the  true  com- 
mander of  the  whole  stift  of  this  Dunkelspiel — stand  poles  asunder 
from  those  inventions  of  Dickens  and  of  some  others  who  are 
ticketed  for  us  by  a  gesture  or  a  phrase  repeated  ad  nauseam. 
And  this  gift  probably  is  most  closely  connected  with  another :  the 
extraordinary  variety  of  Scott's  scene,  character,  and  —  so  far 
as  the  term  is  applicable  to  his  very  effective  but  rather  loose 
fashion  of  story-telling — plot.  It  is  a  common  and  a  just  complaint 
of  novelists,  especially  when  they  are  fertile  r.itlicr  than  barren, 
that  with  them  scene,  plot,  and  character  all  run  into  a  kind  of 


in  SCOTT'S    NOVELS  135 

mould,  that  their  stories  with  a  little  trouble  can  be  thrown  into  a 
sort  of  common  form,  that  their  persons  simply  "  change  from 
the  blue  bed  to  the  brown,"  and  that  the  blue  and  brown  beds 
themselves  are  seen,  under  their  diverse  colours,  to  have  a  singular 
and  not  very  welcome  uniformity  of  pattern  and  furniture.  Even 
Scott  does  not  escape  this  almost  invariable  law  of  the  brain- 
artist  :  it  is  one  of  the  sole  Shakespearian  characteristics  that 
Shakespeare  does  escape  it  entirely  and  altogether.  A  certain 
form  of  huddled  and  not  altogether  probable  catastrophe,  a  knack 
of  introducing  in  the  earlier  part  of  the  story,  as  if  big  with  fate, 
personages  who  afterwards  play  but  a  subordinate  part,  and  one 
or  two  other  things,  might  be  urged  against  Sir  Walter.  But,  on 
the  whole,  no  artist  is  less  chargeable  with  stereotype  than  he. 
His  characters  are  hardly  ever  doubles ;  their  relationships  (certain 
general  connections  excepted,  which  are  practically  the  scaffolding 
of  the  romance  in  itself)  do  not  repeat  themselves ;  the  back- 
grounds, however  much  or  however  little  strict  local  colour  they 
may  have,  are  always  sufficiently  differentiated.  They  have  the 
variety,  as  they  have  the  truth,  of  nature. 

No  detailed  account  can  here  be  attempted  of  the  marvellous 
rapidity  and  popularity  of  the  series  of  novels  from  the  appearance 
of  Waverley  till  just  before  the  author's  death  eighteen  years  later. 
The  anecdotage  of  the  matter  is  enormous.  The  books  were  from 
the  first  anonymous,  and  for  some  time  the  secret  of  their  author- 
ship was  carefully  and  on  the  whole  successfully  preserved.  Even 
several  years  after  the  beginning,  so  acute  a  judge  as  Hazlitt, 
though  he  did  not  entertain,  thought  it  necessary  seriously  to 
discuss,  the  suggestion  that  Godwin  wrote  them, — a  suggestion 
which,  absurd  as,  with  our  illegitimate  advantage  of  distance  and 
perspective,  we  see  it  to  be,  was  less  nonsensical  than  it  seems  to 
those  who  forget  that  at  the  date  of  the  appearance  of  Waver  Jcy 
there  was  no  novelist  who  could  have  been  selected  with  more 
plausibility.  After  a  time  this  and  that  were  put  together,  and  a 
critic  of  the  name  of  Adolphus  constructed  an  argument  of  much 
ingenuity  and  shrewdness  to  show  that  the  author  of  ^Fannion 


136  TllK  NEW  FICTION 


and  the  Lady  of  the  Lake  must  be  the  author  of  Waverhy.  But 
the  secret  was  never  regularly  divulged  till  Sir  Walter's  misfortunes, 
referred  to  in  the  section  on  his  poetry,  made  further  concealment 
not  so  much  useless  as  impossible  in  the  first  place,  and  positively 
detrimental  in  the  second.  The  series  was  dauntlessly  continued, 
despite  the  drag  of  the  Napoleon,  the  necessity  of  attempting  other 
work  that  would  bring  in  money,  and  above  all  the  strain  on  the 
faculties  both  of  imagination  and  labour  which  domestic  as  well  as 
pecuniary  misfortunes  imposed.  Nor  did  Scott,  it  may  be  fear- 
lessly asserted,  though  it  is  not  perhaps  the  general  opinion,  ever 
publish  any  "dotages,"  with  the  possible  exception  of  Castle 
Dangerous,  which  was  not  only  firished  but  begun  when  the  fatal 
disease  of  the  brain  which  killed  him  had  got  the  upper  hand. 
The  introduction  to  the  Chronicles  of  the  Canongate,  written  in 
1827,  is  one  of  the  most  exquisite  and  masterly  things  that  he  ever 
did,  though,  from  its  not  actually  forming  part  of  one  of  the  novels, 
it  is  comparatively  little  known.  The  Fair  Maid  of  Perth,  a.  year 
later,  has  been  one  of  the  most  popular  of  all  abroad,  and  not  the 
least  so  at  home ;  and  there  are  critics  who  rank  Anne  of  Geier- 
stein,  in  1829.  very  high  indeed.  Few  defenders  are  found  for 
Count  Robert  of  Paris,  which  was  in  fact  written  in  the  valley  of 
the  shadow  ;  and  it  may  be  admitted  that  in  his  earlier  days  Scott 
would  certainly  have  been  able  to  give  it  a  fuller  development  and 
a  livelier  turn.  Yet  the  opening  scene,  though  a  little  too  long, 
the  escape  from  the  vaults  of  the  Blachernal,  and  not  a  few  other 
things,  would  be  recognised  as  marvellous  if  they  could  be  put 
before  a  competent  but  unbiassed  taste,  which  knew  nothing  of 
Sir  Walter's  other  work,  but  was  able  to  compare  it  not  merely 
with  the  work  of  his  predecessors,  but  with  that  of  his  imitators, 
numerous  and  enterprising  as  they  were,  at  the  time  that  Count 
Robert  appeared. 

In  such  a  comparison  Scott  at  his  worst  excels  all  others  at 
their  best.  It  is  not  merely  that  in  this  detail  and  in  that  he  has 
the  master}-,  but  that  he  has  succeeded  in  making  novel-writing  in 
general  turn  over  a  completely  new  leaf,  enter  upon  a  distinctly 


in  SCOTT'S    NOVELS  137 

different  competition.  With  the  masterpieces  of  the  eighteenth 
century  novel  he  does  not  enter  into  comparison  at  all :  he  is 
working  on  a  different  scene,  addressing  a  different  audience, 
using  different  tools,  colours,  methods.  Every  successful  novelist 
up  to  his  time  had,  whatever  his  ostensible  '•'•temp,  of  tale," 
quietly  assumed  the  thoughts,  the  speech,  the  manners,  even  to  a 
great  extent  the  dress  and  details  of  his  own  day.  And  in  this 
assumption  all  but  the  greatest  had  inevitably  estranged  from  them 
the  ears  and  eyes  of  days  that  were  not  their  own,  which  days,  no 
doubt,  were  in  turn  themselves  rapidly  hastening  to  change,  but 
never  to  revert  to  the  original  surroundings.  Scott  had  done  in 
prose  fiction  what  the  poets  and  the  dramatists  had  sometimes 
done,  what  very  rare  philosophers  had  sometimes  done  likewise. 
Ostensibly  going  to  the  past,  and  to  some  extent  really  borrowing  its 
circumstances,  he  had  in  reality  gone  straight  to  man  as  man ;  he 
had  varied  the  particular  trapping  only  to  exhibit  the  universal  sub- 
stance. The  Baron  of  Bradwardine,  Dandie  Dinmont,  Edie 
Ochiltree,  Mause  Headrigg,  Bailie  Jarvie,  and  the  long  list  of 
originals  down  to  Oliver  Proudfute  and  even  later,  their  less 
eccentric  companions  from  Fergus  Maclvor  to  Queen  Margaret, 
may  derive  part  of  their  appeal  from  dialect  and  colouring,  from 
picturesque  "  business  "  and  properties.  But  the  chief  of  that 
appeal  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  are  all  men  and  women  of  the 
world,  of  life,  of  time  in  general ;  that  even  when  their  garments, 
even  when  their  words  are  a  little  out  of  fashion,  there  is  real 
flesh  and  blood  beneath  the  garments,  real  thought  and  feeling 
behind  the  words.  It  may  be  urged  by  the  devil's  advocate,  and 
is  not  wholly  susceptible  of  denial  by  his  opponent,  that,  after  the 
first  four  or  five  books,  the  enormous  gains  open  to  Scott  first 
tempted,  and  the  heroic  efforts  afterwards  demanded  of  him  later 
compelled,  the  author  to  put  not  quite  enough  of  himself  and  his 
knowledge  into  his  work,  to  "pad"  if  not  exactly  to  "scamp"  a 
little.  Yet  it  is  the  fact  that  some  of  his  very  best  work  was  not 
only  very  rapidly  written,  but  written  under  such  circumstances 
of  bodily  suffering  and  mental  worry  as  would  have  made  any  work 


138  THE  NEW  FICTION 


at  all  impossible  to  most  men.  And,  on  the  whole,  it  is  perhaps 
as  idle  to  speculate  whether  this  work  might  have  been  better,  as 
it  is  ungenerous  to  grumble  that  it  ought  to  have  been.  For  after 
all  it  is  such  a  body  of  literature  as,  for  complete  liberation  from 
any  debts  to  models,  fertility  and  abundance  of  invention,  nobility 
of  sentiment,  variety  and  keenness  of  delight,  nowhere  else  exists 
as  the  work  of  a  single  author  in  prose. 

It  was  certain  that  an  example  so  fascinating  in  itself,  and  of 
such  extraordinary  profit  in  fame  and  fortune  to  the  author,  would 
be  followed.  It  was  said  with  sufficient  accuracy  that  Scott's  novels, 
at  the  best  of  his  career,  brought  him  in  about  ,£15,000  a  year, 
a  sum  previously  undreamt  of  by  authors,  while  their  reputation 
overshadowed  not  only  all  others  in  England,  but  all  others 
throughout  Europe.  And  it  is  rather  surprising,  and  shows  how 
entirely  Scott  had  the  priority  in  this  field,  that  it  was  not  for 
six  or  seven  years  at  least  that  any  noteworthy  attempts  in  his 
manner  appeared,  while  it  can  scarcely  be  said  that  in  England 
anything  of  very  great  value  was  published  in  it  before  his  death. 
In  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life,  however,  imitations,  chiefly  of  his 
historical  style,  did  appear  in  great  numbers;  and  he  has  left  in  his 
Diary  an  extremely  interesting,  a  very  good-natured,  but  a  very 
shrewd  and  just  criticism  upon  them  in  general,  and  upon  two 
in  particular — the  Brambletye  House  of  Horace  Smith,  one  of  the 
authors  of  the  delightful  parodies  called  Rejected  Addresses, 
and  the  first  book,  Sir  John  Chiverton,  of  an  author  who  was  to 
continue  writing  for  some  halt  century,  and  at  times  to  attain 
very  great  popularity.  This  was  Harrison  Ainsworth,  and  G.  P. 
R.  James  also  began  to  publish  pretty  early  in  the  third  decade  of 
the  century.  James's  Richelieu,  his  first  work  of  mark,  appeared  in 
1825,  the  same  year  as  Sir  John  Chirerton;  but  he  was  rather  the 
older  man  of  the  two,  having  been  born  in  1801,  while  Ainsworth's 
birth  year  was  1805.  The  latter,  too,  long  outlived  James,  who 
died  in  1860,  while  holding  the  post  of  English  Consul  in  Venice, 
whereas  Ainsworth  survived  till  1882.  Both  were  exceedingly  pro- 
lific, James  writing  history  and  other  work  as  well  as  the  novels — 


tn  JAMES — AINSWORTH — GALT  139 

Darnley,  Mary  of  Burgundy,  Henry  Masterton,  John  Marston  Hall, 
and  dozens  of  others — which  made  his  fame;  while  Ainsworth 
(Jack  Sheppard,  The  Tower  of  London,  Crichton,  Rookwood,  Old 
St.  PauPs,  etc.)  was  a  novelist  only.  Both,  especially  between 
1830  and  1850,  achieved  considerable  popularity  with  the  general 
public ;  and  they  kept  it  much  longer  (if  indeed  they  have  yet 
lost  it)  with  schoolboys.  But  while  the  attempt  of  both  to  imitate 
Scott  was  palpable  always,  the  success  of  neither  could  be  ranked 
very  high  by  severe  criticism.  James  wrote  better  than  Ains- 
worth ;  his  historical  knowledge  was  of  a  much  wider  and  more 
accurate  kind,  and  he  was  not  unimbued  with  the  spirit  of 
romance.  But  the  sameness  of  his  situations  (it  became  a 
stock  joke  to  speak  of  the  "  two  horsemen "  who  so  often 
appeared  in  his  opening  scenes),  the  exceedingly  conventional 
character  of  his  handling,  and  the  theatrical  feebleness  of  his 
dialogue,  were  always  reprehended  and  open  to  reprehension. 
Harrison  Ainsworth,  on  the  other  hand,  had  a  real  knack  of  arrest- 
ing and  keeping  the  interest  of  those  readers  who  read  for  mere 
excitement;  he  was  decidedly  skilful  at  gleaning  from  memoirs  and 
other  documents  scraps  of  decoration  suitable  for  his  purpose  ;  he 
could  in  his  better  days  string  incidents  together  with  a  very 
decided  knack,  and,  till  latterly,  his  books  rarely  languished.  But 
his  writing  was  very  poor  in  strictly  literary  merit,  his  style  was 
at  best  bustling  prose  melodrama,  and  his  characters  were  scarcely 
ever  alive. 

Two  writers  might  have  put  in  some  claim  to  priority  over 
Scott  in  "Scotch  novels."  The  first  was  Susan  Ferrier.  (1782- 
1854),  the  Scottish  counterpart  of  Miss  Edgeworth  and  Miss 
Austen,  a  great  friend  of  Scott's  own,  and  author  of  the  novel  of 
Marriage,  written  by  1812,  though  not  published  till  1818.  She 
followed  this  with  The  Inheritance  in  1824,  and  Destiny  in  1831 ; 
but,  though  she  lived  for  nearly  another  quarter-century,  wrote 
nothing  more.  Her  books,  though  wanting,  especially  the  first 
and  third,  in  unity  of  plot,  and  not  improved  to  later  taste  by 
gushes  of  the  exaggerated  sentiment  which  the  eighteenth  century 


I4o  THE  NEW  FICTION 


called  "sensibility,"  contain  character-sketches  and  manners- 
painting  of  quite  extraordinary  vigour,  and  a  great  deal  of  shrewd 
though  rather  hard  wit.  The  maiden  aunts  in  Marriage,  and  the 
Cockney  couple  in  Destiny,  enliven  these  books ;  while  The  In- 
heritance, a  better  story,  abounds  in  still  better  single  figures, 
especially  the  vieille  fille  terrible  Miss  Pratt,  the  affected  Isabella 
Black,  and  "  Uncle  Adam,"  a  vigorous  character-part  drawn  from 
the  author's  father. 

The  other,  John  Gait,  was  born  at  Irvine  in  1779,  had  a  post 
in  the  Customs,  travelled  a  great  deal,  wrote  a  great  deal,  con- 
ducted for  a  time  a  large  but  unsuccessful  scheme  called  the 
Canada  Company,  but  died  with  broken  fortunes  on  nth  April 
1839.  He,  though  with  some  of  the  national  characteristics  which 
have  not  always  made  Scotchmen  popular,  appears  to  r.ave  been 
a  person  of  worth  and  amiability.  He  got  on  well  with  Byron,  a 
very  uncommon  thing;  and  from  Carlyle,  whom  he  met  when 
they  were  both  on  the  staff  of  Fraser,  he  receives  unwontedly 
amiable  notice.  His  literary  production  was  vast  and  totally 
uncritical;  his  poems,  dramas,  etc.,  being  admittedly  worthless, 
his  miscellaneous  writing  mostly  book-making,  while  his  historical 
novels  are  given  up  by  all  but  devotees.  He  had,  however,  a 
special  walk — the  delineation  of  the  small  humours  and  ways  of 
his  native  town  and  county,  in  which,  if  not  exactly  supreme,  he 
has  seldom  been  equalled.  The  Ayrshire  Legatees  is  in  main 
scheme  a  pretty  direct  and  not  very  brilliant  following  of  Hum- 
phrey Clinker;  but  the  letters  of  the  worthy  family  who  visit 
London  are  read  in  a  home  circle  which  shows  Gait's  peculiar 
talent.  It  is  shown  better  still  in  his  next  published  work,  The 
Annals  of  the  Parish,  which  is  said  to  have  been  written  long 
before,  and  in  the  pre-Waverley  days  to  have  been  rejected  by 
the  publishers  because  "  Scotch  novels  could  not  pay."  It  is  not 
exactly  a  novel,  being  literally  what  its  title  holds  out — the  annals 
of  a  Western  Parish  by  its  minister,  the  Rev.  Mr.  Balwhidder, 
a  Presbyterian  Parson  Adams  of  a  less  robust  type,  whose 
description  of  himself  and  parishioners  is  always  good,  and  at 


in  HOOK  141 

times  charming.  Sir  Andrew  Wylie  (a  fantastic  book  of  much 
good  fun  and  much  good  feeling),  The  Entail,  and  The  Provost 
(the  last  two  sometimes  ranked  next  to  the  Annals],  followed 
rapidly,  and  are  all  good  in  a  kind  which  has  been  oddly  revived 
of  late  years  by  some  of  our  most  popular  novelists.  A  better 
writer  than  Gait,  though  a  less  fertile,  was  Dr.  Moir  ("  Delta "), 
another  Blackivood  man,  whose  chief  single  performance  is  Mansie 
Wauch,  but  who  wrote  both  prose  and  verse,  both  tales  and  essays, 
with  considerable  accomplishment  of  style,  and  with  a  very  agree- 
able mixture  of  serious  and  comic  power. 

Meanwhile,  the  historical  novel  did  not  by  any  means  absorb 
the  attention  of  the  crowds  of  aspirants  who  hurried  to  try  their 
fortune  in  the  wake  of  Scott.  Lady  Morgan  (or  rather  Miss  Sydney 
Owenson)  did,  in  The  Wild  Irish  GYr/(i8o6)  and  other  things, 
some  "  rattling  Hibernian  stories  "  quite  early ;  John  Banim  (1798- 
1842)  coincided  with  the  two  Englishmen  and  exceeded  them  in 
goiit  du  terroir ;  and  the  Fairy  Legends  (1826)  of  Crofton  Croker 
(1798-1854)  are  at  their  best  simply  exquisite.  But  the  older  styles 
continued  after  a  fashion,  or  underwent  slight  changes,  before  the 
novel  of  purely  ordinary  life,  on  a  plan  midway  between  Scott  and 
Miss  Austen,  triumphed  in  the  middle  of  the  century.  One  of 
the  most  popular  of  novelists  in  the  reigns  of  George  IV.  and 
William  IV.  was  Theodore  Hook  (1788-1841),  a  man  of  respect- 
able connections  and  excellent  education,  who,  having  made 
himself  a  favourite  with  the  Regent  and  many  persons  of  quality 
as  a  diner-out  and  improvisatore,  received  a  valuable  appointment 
at  the  Mauritius,  laid  himself  open  by  carelessness  to  a  prosecu- 
tion for  malversation,  and,  returning  to  England,  never  entirely 
escaped  from  the  effects  of  this,  though  he  was  extremely 
successful  both  as  a  novelist,  and  as  a  newspaper  writer  and 
editor,  in  the  John  Bull  chiefly.  Some  of  Hook's  political  squibs 
and  light  verses  still  retain  attraction  ;  and  the  tradition  of  his 
extraordinary  faculties  in  improvising  both  words,  music,  and 
dramatic  arrangement  remains.  But  his  novels  (Sayings  and 
Doings,  Gilbert  Gurney,  Gurney  Married,  Maxwell,  etc.)  have 


!43  THE  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 


become  very  dead-alive.  They  have  little  plot ;  a  sort  of  rattling 
adventure  in  a  modernised  following  of  Smollett,  which  is  their 
chief  source  of  interest ;  manners  true  enough  to  their  own  day 
to  be  out-of-date  now,  but  not  handled  with  sufficient  art  ever  to 
regain  the  attraction  of  revived  antiquity;  and  a  very  careless  and 
undistinguished  style. 

The  first  series  of  Hook's  Sayings  and  Doings  appeared  in 
1824,  the  year  before  that  of  the  novels  of  James  and  Ainsworth 
above  noticed.  Three  years  later,  and  five  before  Scott's  death, 
appeared  Falkland,  the  first  (anonymous)  novel  of  a  writer  far 
surpassing  any  of  the  hour  in  talent,  and  credited  by  some  with 
positive  genius.  Edward  George  Earle  Lytton  Bulwer,  afterwards 
Sir  Edward  Lytton-Bulwer,  and  later  still  Lord  Lytton  (born  in 
1800),  was  the  youngest  son  of  General  Bulwer  of  Wood  Balling 
and  Haydon  in  Norfolk,  while  he  on  his  mother's  side  repre- 
sented an  ancient  Hertfordshire  family  seated  at  Knebworth.  He 
was  a  Cambridge  man  ;  he  obtained  the  Chancellor's  prize  for 
English  verse  in  1825,  and  his  first  books  were  in  poetical  form. 
He  became  a  Member  of  Parliament,  being  returned  in  the  Whig 
interest  for  St.  Ives  before  the  Reform  Bill  passed,  and  in  the 
first  Reform  Parliament  for  Lincoln,  which  seat  he  held  for  a 
decade,  receiving  his  baronetcy  in  1835.  For  another  decade  he 
was  out  of  the  House  of  Commons,  though  he  succeeded  to  the 
Knebworth  estate  in  1844.  He  was  returned  for  Hertfordshire 
in  1852,  and,  joining  Lord  Derby's  reconstituted  party,  ranked  for 
the  rest  of  his  life  as  a  Conservative  of  a  somewhat  Liberal  kind 
In  the  second  Derby  administration  he  was  Colonial  Secretary,  but 
took  no  part  in  that  of  1867,  and  died,  just  before  the  return  of 
the  Tories  to  power,  in  1873. 

This  sufficiently  brilliant  political  career  was  complicated  by 
literary  production  and  success  in  a  manner  not  equalled  by  any 
Englishman  of  his  time,  and  only  approached  by  Macaulay  and 
by  Mr.  Disraeli.  Falkland  was  succeeded  by  Pelhani,  which  was 
published  with  his  name,  and  which  was  the  first,  perhaps  the 
most  successful,  and  by  far  the  most  brilliant,  of  the  novels  in 


in  BULWER  143 

which  authors  have  endeavoured  to  secure  the  rank  of  man  of  the 
world  even  more  than  that  of  man  of  letters,  taking  the  method 
chiefly  of  fashionable,  and  therefore  somewhat  ephemeral,  epigram. 
Nor  did  Bulwer  (as  he  was  known  in  the  heyday  of  his  popularity) 
ever  cease  novel-writing  for  the  forty-five  years  which  were  left  to 
him,  while  the  styles  of  his  production  varied  with  fashion  in  a 
manner  impossible  to  a  man  of  less  consummate  versatility  and 
talent,  though  perhaps  equally  impossible  to  one  of  a  very  decided 
turn  of  genius.  The  fashionable  novel,  the  crime  novel,  the  romance 
of  mystery,  the  romance  of  classical  times,  the  historical  novel,  by 
turns  occupied  him  ;  and  it  is  more  easy  to  discover  faults  in  Paul 
Clifford,  Eugene  Aram,  The  Pilgrims  of  the  Rhine,  The  Last  Days 
of  Pompeii,  Ernest  Maltravers,  Zanoni,  Rienzi,  The  Last  of  the 
Barons,  and  Harold,  than  to  refuse  admiration  to  their  extra- 
ordinary qualities.  Then  their  author,  recognising  the  public 
taste,  as  he  always  did,  or  perhaps  exemplifying  it  with  an  almost 
unexampled  quickness,  turned  to  the  domestic  kind,  which  was  at 
last,  moje  than  thirty  years  after  Miss  Austen's  death,  forcing  its 
way,  and  wrote  The  Caxtons,  My  Novel,  and  What  will  he  do  with 
it  ? — books  which  to  some  have  seemed  his  greatest  triumphs.  The 
veering  of  that  taste  back  again  to  tales  of  terror  was  acknowledged 
by  A  Strange  Story,  which,  in  1861,  created  an  excitement  rarely, 
if  ever,  caused  by  the  work  of  a  man  who  had  been  writing  for 
more  than  a  generation  ;  while  The  Haunted  and  the  Haunters,  a 
brief  ghost-story  contributed  to  Blackwood's  Magazine,  has  always 
seemed  to  the  present  writer  the  most  perfect  thing  that  he  ever 
did,  and  one  of  the  most  perfect  things  of  its  kind  ever  done. 
In  the  very  last  years  of  his  life,  the  wonderful  girouette  of  his 
imagination  felt  other  popular  gales,  and  produced — partly  as 
novels  of  actual  society,  partly  as  Janus-faced  satires  of  what  was 
and  what  might  be—T/ie  Coming  Race,  Kenelm  Chillingly,  and 
the  posthumous  Parisians. 

But  this  list  of  novels,  which  does  not  include  by  name  much 
more  than  two  -  thirds  of  his  actual  production,  by  no  means 
exhausts  Lord  Lytton's  literary  work.  For  some  years,  chiefly 


144  THE  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 

before  he  had  passed  middle  life,  he  was  an  active  dramatist,  and 
at  least  three  of  his  plays — The  Lady  of  Lyons,  Richelieu,  and 
Money — had  a  success  (not  merely  passing,  and  in  the  first  case  at 
least  permanent)  which  few  if  any  other  plays  of  the  century  have 
had.  He  was  always  returning  to  verse,  though  never  with  real 
poetical  success ;  the  exceptions  which  may  be  urged  most 
forcibly  being  his  translations  from  Schiller,  a  congenial  original. 
He  was  at  one  time  editor  of  the  New  Monthly  Magazine.  He 
translated  freely,  he  wrote  much  criticism,  —  which  is  often  in 
isolated  passages,  if  not  so  often  in  general  drift  and  grasp, 
extremely  good, — and  he  was  a  constant  essayist  in  very  various 
kinds.  It  is  probable  that  if  his  entire  works  were  ever  collected, 
which  is  not  likely,  few,  if  any,  authors  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
though  it  be  one  of  unbridled  writing  and  printing,  could  equal 
him  in  volume ;  while  it  is  certain  that  very  few  indeed  could 
produce  more  numerous  testimonials  of  the  kind  given  by 
the  immediate,  and  not  merely  immediate,  success  of  separate 
works. 

Yet  it  has  been  sometimes  complained,  sometimes  boasted, 
that  "  with  the  critics  Bulwer  is  dead  " ;  and  it  is  not  very  certain 
that  with  the  faithful  herd  of  uncritical  readers  the  first  Lord 
Lytton  keeps  any  great  place.  Even  many  years  ago  he  had 
ceased  to  be,  if  he  ever  was,  a  general  favourite  with  those  who 
specially  loved  literature  ;  and  it  is  rather  doubtful  whether  he 
will  ever  regain  even  a  considerable  vogue  of  esteem.  Perhaps  this 
may  be  unjust,  for  he  certainly  possessed  ability  in  bulk,  and 
perhaps  here  and  there  in  detail,  far  surpassing  that  of  all  but  the 
very  greatest  of  his  contemporaries.  Even  the  things  which  were 
most  urged  against  him  by  contemporary  satirists,  and  which  it  is 
to  be  feared  are  remembered  at  second-hand  when  the  first-hand 
knowledge  of  his  work  has  declined,  need  not  be  fatal.  A  man 
may  write  such  things  as  "There  is  an  eloquence  in  Memory 
because  it  is  the  nurse  of  Hope"  without  its  being  necessary  to 
cast  up  his  capital  letters  against  him  in  perpetuity,  or  to  inquire 
without  ceasing  whether  eloquence  is  an  inseparable  property  of 


in  DICKENS  145 

nurses.  But  he  had  two  great  faults — want  of  concentration  and 
want  of  reality ;  and  the  very  keenness,  the  very  delicacy  of  his 
appreciation  of  the  shiftings  of  popular  taste  may  seem  without 
unfairness  to  argue  a  certain  shallowness  of  individual  soil,  a 
literary  compost  wherein  things  spring  up  rapidly  because  they 
have  no  depth  of  earth,  but,  also  because  they  have  no  depth  of 
earth,  rapidly  vanish  and  wither  away.  The  novel  and  the 
magazine  have  beyond  all  doubt  given  us  much  admirable  work 
which  without  them  we  should  not  have  had ;  they  have  almost 
as  certainly,  and  in  no  case  much  more  certainly  than  in  Bulwer's, 
over-forced  and  over-coaxed  into  hasty  and  ephemeral  production 
talents  which,  with  a  little  more  hardening  and  under  less  exacting 
circumstances,  might  have  become  undoubted  genius.  Senti- 
mental grandiloquence  is  not  by  itself  fatal :  the  fashion  which 
tempts  to  it,  which  turns  on  it,  may  return  to  it  again ;  and  it  is 
never  impossible  to  make  allowance  for  its  excesses,  especially 
when,  as  in  the  case  under  discussion,  it  is  accompanied  by  a 
rare  and  true  satiric  grasp  of  life.  In  these  early  externals  of 
his,  Bulwer  was  only  the  most  illustrious  of  the  innumerable 
victims  of  Byron.  But  his  failure  to  make  his  figures  thoroughly 
alive  is  more  serious ;  and  this  must  be  put  down  partly  to 
incapacity  to  take  pains. 

It  was  nearly  ten  years  after  the  first  success  of  Bulwer,  and 
more  than  half  as  much  after  the  death  of  Scott,  that  a  novelist 
greater  than  any  the  century  had  seen,  except  Scott  himself 
and  Miss  Austen,  appeared.  Charles  Dickens  and  Lord  Lytton 
became  rather  intimate  friends ;  but  their  origins  and  early  ex- 
periences were  curiously  different.  Dickens's  father  had  been  in 
a  Government  office ;  but  after  the  Peace  he  took  to  the  press, 
and  his  son  (born  in  1812),  after  some  uncomfortable  boyish 
servitudes  which  have  left  their  mark  on  David  Copperfield,  fled 
to  the  same  refuge  of  the  destitute  in  our  times.  He  was  a 
precocious,  but  not  an  extraordinarily  precocious  writer ;  for  he 
was  four-and-twenty  when  the  Sketches  by  Boz  were  printed  in  a 
volume  after  appearing  in  the  Morning  Chronicle.  But  the  Sketches 

L 


146  THK  NKW  FICTION  CHAP. 

by  Boz,  though  containing  some  very  sprightly  things,  are  but  as 
farthing  candles  to  sunlight  when  compared  with  the  wonderful 
and  wholly  novel  humour  of  The  Pickwick  Papers,  which  (Dickens 
having  been  first  (1836)  employed  to  write  them  as  mere  letterpress 
to  the  sporting  sketches  of  the  caricaturist  Seymour)  appeared  as 
a  book  in  1838.  From  that  time  their  author  had  a  success 
which  in  money  came  second  to  that  of  Scott,  and  which  both 
pecuniarily  and  otherwise  enabled  him  to  write  pretty  much  as  he 
pleased.  So  to  the  last  the  style  of  his  novels  never  bore  much 
reference  to  any  public  taste  or  demand  ;  and  he  developed  him- 
self more  strictly  according  to  his  own  bent  than  almost  any 
writer  of  English  who  was  not  born  to  fortune.  During  the  last 
twenty  years  of  his  life,  which  ended  suddenly  on  gth  June  1870, 
he  was  a  newspaper  editor — first  of  Household  Words,  then  of  All 
the  Year  Round  ;  but  these  very  periodicals  were  of  his  own  making 
and  design.  He  made  two  journeys  to  America  :  one  very  early 
in  1842,  with  a  literary  result  (American  Notes']  of  very  sharp 
criticism  of  its  people;  the  other  late  in  1867,  when  he  made 
large  sums  by  reading  from  his  works — a  style  of  entertainment 
which,  again,  was  almost  of  his  own  invention,  and  which  gave 
employment  to  a  very  strong  dramatic  and  histrionic  faculty  that 
found  little  other  vent.  But  his  life  was  extremely  uneventful, 
being  for  its  last  two-and-thirty  years  simply  one  long  spell  of 
hard  though  lavishly  rewarded  literary  labour. 

The  brilliancy  and  the  originality  of  the  product  of  this  can 
never  be  denied.  True  to  his  general  character  of  independence, 
Dickens  owes  hardly  anything  to  any  predecessor  except  Smollett, 
to  whom  his  debts  are  rather  large,  and  perhaps  to  Theodore 
Hook,  to  whom,  although  the  fact  lias  not  been  generally  recog- 
nised, they  exist.  He  had  had  no  regular  education,  had  read  as 
a  boy  little  but  the  old  novelists,  and  never  became  as  a  man  one 
of  either  wide  learning  or  much  strictly  literary  taste.  His  tem- 
perament, indeed,  was  of  that  insubordinate  middle-class  variety 
which  rather  resents  the  supremacy  of  any  classics  ;  and  he 
carried  the  same  feeling  into  art,  into  politic';,  and  into  the  discus 


Ill  DICKENS  147 

sion  of  the  vague  problems  of  social  existence  which  have  so  much 
occupied  the  last  three-quarters  of  the  century.  Had  this  icono- 
clastic but  ignorant  zeal  of  his  (which  showed  itself  in  his  second 
novel,  Nicholas  Nickleby,  and  was  apparent  in  his  last  completed 
one,  Our  Mutual  Friend)  been  united  with  less  original  genius, 
the  result  must  have  been  infinitely  tedious,  and  could  not  have 
been  in  any  way  profitable.  For  Dickens's  knowledge,  as  has 
been  said,  was  very  limited ;  his  logical  faculties  were  not  strong ; 
and  while  constantly  attempting  to  satirise  the  upper  classes, 
he  knew  extremely  little  about  them,  and  has  never  drawn  a 
single  "  aristocrat,"  high  government  official,  or  "  big-wig  "  gener- 
ally, who  presents  the  remotest  resemblance  to  a  living  being. 
But  he  knew  the  lower  and  lower  middle  classes  of  his  own  day 
with  wonderful  accuracy ;  he  could  inform  this  knowledge  of  his 
with  that  indefinable  comprehension  of  man  as  man  which  has 
been  so  often  noted ;  and  over  and  above  this  he  possessed  an 
imagination,  now  humorous,  now  terrible,  now  simply  grotesque, 
of  a  range  and  volume  rarely  equalled,  and  of  a  quality  which 
stands  entirely  by  itself,  or  is  approached  at  a  distance,  and  with  a 
difference,  only  by  that  of  his  great  French  contemporary  Balzac. 
This  imagination,  essentially  plastic,  so  far  outran  the  strictly 
critical  knowledge  of  mankind  as  mankind  just  mentioned  that  it 
has  invested  Dickens's  books  and  characters  with  a  peculiarity 
found  nowhere  else,  or  only  in  the  instance  just  excepted.  They 
are  never  quite  real :  we  never  experience  or  meet  anything  or 
anybody  quite  like  them  in  the  actual  world.  And  yet  in  their 
own  world  they  hold  their  position  and  play  their  parts  quite 
perfectly  and  completely :  they  obey  their  own  laws,  they  are 
consistent  with  their  own  surroundings.  Occasionally  the  work 
is  marred  by  too  many  and  too  glaring  tricks  of  mannerism  :  this 
was  especially  the  case  with  the  productions  of  the  period  between 
1855  and  1865.  The  pathos  of  Dickens  was  always  regarded 
as  slightly  conventional  and  unreal  by  critical  judges.  But  his 
humour,  though  never  again  attaining  the  same  marvellous 
flow  of  unforced  merriment  which  the  Pickwick  Papers  had 


1 48  THE  NEW  FICTION 


shown,  was  almost  unfailing ;  and,  thanks  to  the  gift  of  project- 
ing imaginative  character  above  noticed,  it  was  never  merely 
monotonous. 

These  and  other  gifts  were  shown  in  a  long  line  of  novels 
covering  just  thirty  years,  from  Boz  to  Our  Mutual  Friend ;  for 
the  last  few  years  of  his  life,  disturbed  by  his  American  tour,  by 
increasing  ill-health,  and  other  things,  produced  nothing  but  the 
beginnings  of  an  unfinished  novel,  Edwin  Drood.  He  attempted 
little  besides  novels,  and  what  he  did  attempt  outside  of  them 
was  not  very  fortunate,  except  the  delightful  Uncommercial 
Traveller,  wherein  in  his  later  days  he  achieved  a  sort  of  mellowed 
version  of  the  Boz  sketches,  subdued  more  to  the  actual,  but  not 
in  the  least  tamed  or  weakened.  Although  a  keen  lover  of  the 
theatre  and  an  amateur  actor  of  remarkable  merit,  he  had  the 
sense  and  self-denial  never  to  attempt  plays  except  in  an  indirect 
fashion  and  in  one  or  two  instances,  nor  ever  in  his  own  name 
solely.  His  Child's  History  of  England  (1854)  is  probably  the 
worst  book  ever  written  by  a  man  of  genius,  except  Shelley's 
novels,  and  has  not,  like  them,  the  excuse  of  extreme  youth.  His 
Pictures  from  Italy  (1845),  despite  vivid  passages,  are  quite  un- 
worthy of  him  ;  and  even  the  American  Notes  could  be  given 
up  without  a  sigh,  seeing  that  we  have  Martin  Chuzzlewit.  But 
his  novels,  despite  their  many  faults,  could  not  be  dispensed  with, 
— no  one  who  understands  literary  value  would  give  up  even  the 
worst  of  them, — while  his  earlier  "Christmas  Books"  (during  the 
fancy  for  these  things  in  the  forties)  and  his  later  contributions 
to  the  Christmas  numbers  of  his  periodicals  contain  some  of  his 
best  fantastic  and  pathetic  work.  Pickwick  was  immediately  fol- 
lowed by  Oliver  Twist, — a  very  popular  book,  and  in  parts  a  very 
powerful  one,  but  containing  in  germ  most  of  the  faults  which 
afterwards  developed  themselves,  and,  with  the  exception  of  the 
"Artful  Dodger,"  not  bringing  out  any  of  his  great  character- 
creations.  Nicholas  Nicklcby  (1838)  is  a  story  designed  to  fix  a 
stigma  on  cheap  private  schools,  and  marred  by  some  satire  as 
cheap  as  the  schools  themselves  on  the  fashionable  and  aristo- 


Ill  DICKENS  149 

cratic  society  of  which  to  his  dying  day  Dickens  never  knew 
anything ;  but  it  is  of  great  interest  as  a  story,  and  full  of  admirable 
humoristic  sketches,  which  almost  if  not  quite  excused  not  merely 
the  defect  of  knowledge  just  referred  to,  but  the  author's  unfor- 
tunate proneness  to  attempt  irony,  of  which  he  had  no  command, 
and  argument,  of  which  he  had  if  possible  less.  His  next  two 
stories,  The  Old  Curiosity  Shop  and  Barnaby  Rudge,  were  en- 
shrined (1840-41)  in  an  odd  framework  of  fantastic  presentation 
under  the  general  title  of  Master  Humphrey's  Clock,- — a  form  after- 
wards discarded  with  some  advantage,  but  also  with  some  loss. 
The  Old  Curiosity  Shop,  strongly  commended  to  its  own  public 
and  seriously  hampered  since  by  some  rather  maudlin  pathos, 
improved  even  upon  Nicholas  Nickleby  in  the  humoristic  vein  ; 
and  while  Dick  Swiveller,  Codlin  and  Short,  Mr.  Chuckster, 
and  others  remain  as  some  of  the  best  of  Dickens's  peculiar  char- 
acters of  the  lighter  sort,  the  dwarf  Quilp  is  perhaps  his  only 
thoroughly  successful  excursion  into  the  grimmer  and  more  horrible 
kind  of  humour.  Barnaby  Rudge  is  in  part  a  historical  novel, 
and  the  description  of  the  riots  of  Eighty  is  of  extraordinary 
power ;  but  the  real  appeal  of  the  book  lies  in  the  characters 
of  the  Varden  family,  with  the  handmaid  Miss  Miggs  and  the 
ferocious  apprentice  Tappertit.  Sir  John  Chester,  a  sort  of  study 
from  Chesterfield,  is  one  of  the  most  disastrous  of  this  author's 
failures ;  but  Dennis  the  Hangman  may  have  a  place  by  Quilp. 
Then  (1843)  came  Martin  Chuzzlewit,  which,  as  observed,  em- 
bodied his  American  experiences  in  a  manner  which  may  or  may 
not  have  been  fair,  but  which  was  exquisitely  funny.  It  also 
added  the  immortal  figure  of  Mrs.  Gamp  (not  unattended  by  any 
means)  to  the  glorious  list  of  his  comic  creations.  It  was  in 
Dombey  and  Son  (1846-48)  that  the  Dickens  of  the  decadence  first 
appeared ;  the  maudlin  strain  of  The  Old  Curiosity  Shop  being 
repeated  in  Paul  Dombey,  while  a  new  and  very  inauspicious 
element  appeared  in  certain  mechanical  tricks  of  phrase,  and  in  a 
totally  unreal  style  of  character,  exemplified  in  the  Bagstocks,  the 
Carkers,  and  so  forth.  Yet  Captain  Cuttle,  his  friend  Bunsby, 


150  TIIK  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 

Miss  Nipper,  and  the  inestimable  Toots,  put  in  ample  bail  for 
this  also.  And  it  was  followed  (1849-50)  by  David  Copperjield, 
one  of  the  capital  books  of  English  fiction.  This  was  to  some 
extent  obviously  autobiographic ;  but,  setting  some  questions  of 
taste  aside,  not  unduly  so.  Even  the  hero  is  too  real  to  be 
frigid  ;  of  the  two  heroines,  Dora,  if  an  idiot,  is  saved  by  pathos 
different  from  that  of  Paul  and  Nell,  while  the  insipidity  of 
Agnes  does  not  greatly  spoil  the  story;  and  the  commonplace 
theatricality  of  the  Steerforth  and  Little  Em'ly  episode  can  be 
neglected.  On  the  other  hand,  Miss  Trotwood,  David  Copper- 
field's  schools  and  school-fellows,  Uriah  Heap  (not  wholly  good 
as  he  is),  and  above  all  the  priceless  Mr.  Micawber,  would  suffice 
to  keep  twenty  books  alive. 

But  this  novel,  though  by  no  means  Dickens's  Corunna  or 
even  his  Malplaquet,  was  certainly  the  climax  of  his  career,  and 
no  impartial  and  competent  critic  could  ever  give  him  the  same 
praise  again.  In  two  long  stories,  Bleak  House  and  Little  Dorrit, 
and  in  a  shorter  one,  Hard  Times,  which  appeared  between  1852 
and  1857,  the  mania  of  "purpose"  and  the  blemish  of  mechani- 
cal mannerism  appeared  to  a  far  worse  degree  than  previously, 
though  in  the  first  named  at  any  rate  there  were  numerous  conso- 
lations of  the  old  kind.  The  Tale  of  Tu'o  Cities  (1859)  has  been 
more  differently  judged  than  any  other  of  his  works ;  some  ex- 
tolling it  as  a  great  romance,  if  not  quite  a  great  historical  novel, 
while  others  see  in  it  little  more  than  mixed  mannerism  and 
melodrama.  Something  of  the  same  difference  prevails  about 
Great  Expcctatio-ns  (1860-61),  the  parties  as  a  rule  changing  sides, 
and  those  who  dislike  the  Tale  of  Two  Cities  rejoicing  in  Great 
Expectations,  Dickens's  closest  attempt  at  real  modern  life  (with 
a  fantastic  admixture  of  course),  and  in  its  heroine,  Estella,  his 
almost  sole  creation  of  a  live  girl.  Our  M^utual  Friend  (1864-65), 
though  not  a  return  to  the  great  days,  brought  these  parties  some- 
what together  again,  thanks  to  the  Doll's  Dressmaker  and  Rogue 
Riderhood.  And  then,  for  it  is  impossible  to  found  any  sound 
critical  judgment  on  the  fragment  of  Edwin  Drood,  the  building 


Ill  THACKERAY  151 

of  the  most  extraordinary  monument  of  the  fantastic  in  literature 
ceased  abruptly. 

That  exactly  the  same  fate  befell  the  great  successor,  rival,  and 
foil  of  Dickens  in  novel-writing  during  the  middle  of  the  century 
was  due  to  no  metaphysical  aid,  but  to  the  simple  and  prosaic 
fact  that  at  the  time  publication  in  parts,  independently  or  in 
periodicals,  was  the  usual  method.  Although  the  life  of  William 
Makepeace  Thackeray  was  as  little  eventful  as  Dickens's  own, 
their  origin  and  circumstances  were  as  different  as  their  work. 
Dickens,  as  has  been  said,  was  born  in  distinctly  the  lower  section 
of  the  middle  class,  and  had,  if  any  education,  a  very  irregular  one. 
Thackeray,  who  was  born  at  Calcutta  in  1811,  belonged  to  a 
good  family,  regularly  connected  with  English  public  schools  and 
universities,  inherited  a  small  but  comfortable  fortune,  and  was 
himself  educated  at  the  Charterhouse  and  at  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  though  he  took  no  degree.  Unsuccessful  as  an 
artist  (it  is  one  of  the  chief  pieces  of  literary  anecdote  of  our 
times  that  he  offered  himself  fruitlessly  to  Dickens  as  an  illustra- 
tor), and  having  by  imprudence  or  accident  lost  his  private 
means,  he  began  to  write,  especially  in  the  then  new  and 
audacious  Fraser's  Magazine.  For  this,  for  other  periodicals,  and 
for  Punch  later,  he  performed  a  vast  amount  of  miscellaneous 
work,  part  only  of  which,  even  with  the  considerable  addition 
made  at  last  in  1886,  has  ever  been  enshrined  in  his  collected 
works.  It  is  all  very  remarkable,  and  can  easily  be  seen  now  to 
be  quite  different  from  any  other  work  of  the  time  (the  later 
thirties) ;  but  it  is  very  unequal  and  distinctly  uncertain  in  touch. 
These  qualities  or  defects  also  appear  in  his  first  publications 
in  volume — the  Paris  (1840)  and  Irish  (1843)  Sketch -JBooks,  and 
the  novels  of  Catherine  and  Barry  Lyndon.  The  Punch  work 
(which  included  the  famous  Book  of  Snobs  and  the  admirable 
attempts  in  misspelling  on  the  model  of  Swift  and  Smollett  known 
as  the  Memoirs  of  Mr.  Yelloivplush,  with  much  else)  marked  a 
distinct  advance  in  firmness  of  handling  and  raciness  of  humour ; 
while  the  author,  who,  though  now  a  very  poor  man,  had  access  to 


i52  THE  NEW  FICTION  CHAP. 

the  best  society,  was  constantly  adding  to  his  stock  of  observa 
tion  as  well  as  to  his  literary  practice.  It  was  not,  however,  till 
1846,  when  he  began  Vanity  Fair,  that  any  very  large  number  of 
persons  began  to  understand  what  a  star  had  risen  in  English 
letters ;  nor  can  even  Vanity  Fair  be  said  to  have  had  any 
enormous  popularity,  though  its  author's  powers  were  shown 
in  a  different  way  during  its  publication  in  parts  by  the  appear- 
ance of  a  third  sketch-book,  \.\\e  Journey  from  Cornhill  to  Grand 
Cairo,  more  perfect  than  either  of  its  forerunners,  and  by 
divers  extremely  brilliant  Christmas  books.  Vanity  Fair  was 
succeeded  in  1849  (for  Thackeray,  a  man  fond  of  society  and  a 
little  indolent,  was  fortunately  i.ever  a  very  rapid  writer)  by 
Pendcnnis,  which  holds  as  autobiography,  though  not  perhaps 
in  creative  excellence,  the  same  place  among  his  works  as  Copper- 
field  does  among  those  of  Dickens.  Several  slighter  things 
accompanied  or  followed  this,  Thackeray  showing  himself  at 
once  an  admirable  lecturer,  and  an  admirable  though  not  always 
quite  judicial  critic,  in  a  series  of  discourses  afterwards  published 
as  a  volume  on  The  English  Humourists  of  the  Eighteenth  Century. 
But  it  was  not  till  1852  that  the  marvellous  historical  novel  of 
Esmond — the  greatest  book  in  its  own  special  kind  ever  written — 
appeared,  and  showed  at  once  the  fashion  in  which  the  author 
had  assimilated  the  Queen  Anne  period  and  his  grasp  of  charac- 
ter and  story.  He  returned  to  modern  times  in  The  Newcomes 
(1853-55),  which  someput  at  the  head  of  his  work  as  a  contemporary 
painter  of  manners.  After  this  he  had  seven  years  of  life  which 
were  well  filled.  He  followed  up  Esmond  with  The  Virginians 
(1857-58),  a  novel  of  the  third  quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
which  has  not  been  generally  rated  high,  but  which  contains  some  of 
his  very  best  things  ;  he  went  to  America  and  lectured  on  The  Four 
Georges  (lectures  again  brilliant  in  their  kind);  he  became  (1860) 
editor  of  the  Cornhill  Magazine  and  wrote  in  it  two  stories,  Lorei 
the  Widower  and  Philip ;  while  he  struck  out  a  new  line  in  a 
certain  series  of  contributions  called  The  Roundabout  Papers,  some 
of  which  were  among  his  very  last,  and  nearly  all  of  them  among  his 


Ill  THACKERAY  153 

most  characteristic  and  perfect  work.  He  had  begun  yet  another 
novel,  Denis  Duval,  which  was  to  deal  with  the  last  quarter  of  the 
century  he  knew  so  well ;  but  he  died  suddenly  two  days  before 
Christmas  1863,  leaving  it  a  mere  fragment.  He  had  unsuccess- 
fully attempted  play-writing  in  The  Wolves  and  tfie  Lamb>  an 
earlier  and  dramatic  version  of  Lovel  the  Widower.  And  during 
almost  his  whole  literary  career  he  had  been  a  sparing  but  an 
exquisite  writer  of  a  peculiar  kind  of  verse,  half  serious  half  comic, 
which  is  scarcely  inferior  in  excellence  to  his  best  prose.  "  The 
Ballad  of  Bouillabaisse  "  and  "  The  Age  of  Wisdom,"  to  take  only 
two  examples,  are  unmatched  in  their  presentation  of  pathos  that 
always  keeps  clear  of  the  maudlin,  and  is  wide-eyed  if  not  dry- 
eyed  in  view  of  all  sides  of  life ;  while  such  things  as  "  Lyra 
Hibernica  "  and  "  The  Ballads  of  Policeman  X  "  have  never  been 
surpassed  as  verse  examples  of  pure,  broad,  roaring  farce  that 
still  retains  a  certain  reserve  and  well-bred  scholarship  of  tone. 

But  his  verse,  however  charming  and  unique,  could  never 
have  given  him  the  exalted  and  massive  pedestal  which  his  prose 
writings,  and  especially  his  novels,  provide.  Even  without  the 
novels,  as  without  the  verse,  he  would  still  occupy  a  high  place 
among  English  writers  for  the  sake  of  his  singular  and  delightful 
style,  and  for  the  attitude  both  to  life  and  to  letters,  corresponding 
with  that  style,  which  his  essays  and  miscellanies  exhibit.  This 
style  is  not  by  any  means  free  from  minor  blemishes,  though  it 
discarded  many  of  these  as  time  went  on.  But  it  has  an  extra- 
ordinary vivacity ;  a  manner  entirely  its  own,  which  yet  seldom  or 
never  approaches  mannerism ;  a  quality  of  humour  for  which  no 
word  would  be  so  fit  as  the  old-fashioned  "  archness,"  if  that  had 
not  been  so  hopelessly  degraded  before  even  the  present  century 
opened ;  at  need,  an  unsurpassed  pathos  which  never  by  any 
chance  or  exception  succumbs  to  the  demon  of  the  gushing  or 
maudlin ;  a  flexibility  and  facility  of  adaptation  to  almost  all  (not 
quite  all)  subjects  which  is  hard  to  parallel. 

And  this  style  reflects  with  more  than  common  exactness, 
even  in  these  minor  works,  the  attitude  above  spoken  of,  which  is 


154  T11K  NKW  FICTION 


not  less  unique  and  not  less  inestimable  than  the  style  itself. 
Towards  some  of  the  "  great  subjects  "  Thackeray  indeed  adopts 
not  quite  a  Shakespearian  silence,  but  a  slightly  uneasy  respect. 
Never  irreligious  as  he  was,  there  was  something  in  him  of  his 
own  beloved  eighteenth  century's  dislike  and  discomfort  in  face  of 
religious  dogma  and  religious  enthusiasm ;  he  had  no  meta- 
physical head  ;  his  politics  (he  once  stood  for  Parliament)  were  a 
little  childish.  It  was  his,  in  short,  not  so  much  to  argue  as  to 
observe,  to  feel,  to  laugh  with  no  unkindness  but  with  infinite  com- 
prehension, to  enjoy,  to  suffer.  Of  all  the  innumerable  cants  that 
ever  were  canted,  the  cant  about  Thackeray's  "  cynicism  "  was  the 
silliest  and  the  most  erroneous.  He  knew  the  weakness  of  man, 
and  laughed  at  it  as  the  wise  knows  and  laughs,  "  knowing  also," 
as  the  poet  says,  "that  he  himself  must  die."  But  he  did  not 
even  despise  this  weakness,  much  less  is  he  harsh  to  it.  On  the 
contrary,  he  is  milder  not  only  than  Swift,  but  even  than  Addison 
or  Miss  Austen,  and  he  is  never  wroth  with  human  nature  save 
when  it  is  not  only  weak  but  base. 

All  these  good  gifts  and  others,  such  as  incomparable  power  of 
presenting  scene  and  personage  to  the  necessary  extent  and  with 
telling  detail,  appear  in  his  novels,  with  the  addition  of  a  greater 
gift  than  any  of  them — the  gift  most  indispensable  of  all  others  to 
the  novelist — the  gift  of  creating  and  immortalising  character.  Of 
mere  story,  of  mere  plot,  Thackeray  was  not  a  great  master  ;  and 
he  has  made  himself  appear  a  less  great  master  than  he  was  by  his 
fancy  for  interlarding  his  narratives  with  long  addresses  to  the 
reader,  and  by  his  other  fancy  for  extending  them  over  very 
great  spaces  of  time.  The  unities  are  no  doubt  in  fiction,  if  not 
in  drama,  something  of  a  caricature ;  but  it  is  seldom  possible  to 
neglect  them  to  the  extent  of  years  and  decades  without  paying 
the  penalty  ;  and  Thackeray  is  not  of  those  who  have  evaded 
payment.  But  in  the  creation  of  living  character  he  stands  simply 
alone  among  novelists:  above  even  Fielding,  though  his  characters 
may  have  something  less  of  massiveness ;  much  above  Scott, 
whose  consummate  successes  are  accompanied  by  not  a  few  failures : 


THACKERAY  155 


and  out  of  sight  of  almost  every  one  else  except  Miss  Austen, 
whose  world  is  different,  and,  as  a  world,  somewhat  less  of  flesh 
and  blood.  In  Vanity  Fair  he  is  still  in  this  respect  not  quite 
at  his  acme ;  and  the  magnificent  character  of  Becky  Sharp 
(the  attempt  to  rival  whom  by  her  almost  exact  contemporary, 
Valerie  Marneffe,  is  a  singular  critical  error),  supported  as  it  is  by 
the  lesser  successes  of  Jos  and  Rawdon,  of  George  Osborne  and 
Lord  Steyne,  does  not  find  itself,  save  now  and  then,  especially  in 
the  crowning  scene  of  the  scandal  in  Curzon  Street,  completely 
parted  or  completely  put  in  scene.  And  so  at  the  other  end 
of  the  list,  from  The  Virginians,  fine  as  much  of  that  is,  onwards, 
it  is  permissible,  without  unreason  or  want  of  generosity,  to  discern 
a  slight,  a  very  slight,  flagging,  not  in  the  quality  or  kind  of  the 
power,  but  in  the  vigour  and  freshness  with  which  it  is  applied. 
But  in  Pendennis,  in  Esmond,  and  in  The  Newcomes,  it  appears 
as  it  does  nowhere  else  in  English,  or  in  any  literature.  It  is  not 
so  much  the  holding  up  of  the  mirror  to  life  as  the  presentation 
of  life  itself.  Although  the  figures,  the  scheme  of  thought  and 
sentiment  and  sense,  differ  from  what  we  find  in  Shakespeare  by 
the  whole  difference  between  poetry  and  prose,  there  is,  on  the 
lower  level,  a  positive  gain  in  vividness  by  the  absence  of  the 
restraints  and  conventions  of  the  drama  and  the  measured  line. 
Every  act,  every  scene,  every  person  in  these  three  books  is  real 
with  a  reality  which  has  been  idealised  just  up  to,  and  not  beyond, 
the  necessities  of  literature.  It  does  not  matter  what  the  acts,  the 
scenes,  the  personages  may  be.  Whether  we  are  at  the  height  of 
romantic  passion  with  Esmond's  devotion  to  Beatrix,  and  his 
transactions  with  the  duke  and  the  prince  over  diamonds  and 
title-deeds  ;  whether  the  note  is  that  of  the  simplest  human  pathos, 
as  in  Colonel  Newcome's  death-bed ;  whether  we  are  indulged 
with  society  at  Baymouth  and  Oxbridge ;  whether  we  take  part  in 
Maryborough's  campaigns  or  assist  at  the  Back  Kitchen — we  are  in 
the  House  of  Life,  a  mansion  not  too  frequently  opened  to  us  by 
the  writers  of  prose  fiction.  It  was  impossible  that  Thackeray 
should  live  long  or  write  very  many  novels  when  he  had  once 


156  TIIH  NEW  FICTION 


found  his  way.  The  lesson  of  the  greatest  imagination  of  his 
great  contemporary  and  master  settles  that  Not  the  "  Peau  de 
Chagrin  "  itself  could  have  enabled  any  man  to  produce  a  long 
succession  of  novels  such  as  Vanity  Fair  and  Esmond. 

During  the  time  before  the  century  reached  its  middle,  in 
which  Bulwer  and  Dickens  were  the  most  popular  of  novelists, 
while  Thackeray  was  slowly  making  his  way  to  the  place  that  was 
properly  his,  the  demand  for  novels,  thoroughly  implanted  in  the 
public  by  the  success  of  Scott,  was  constantly  met  by  work  of  all 
sorts,  very  little  of  which  survives  except  in  country  circulating 
libraries  and  on  the  shelves  of  houses  the  ownership  of  which 
has  not  changed  hands  for  some  considerable  time.  Very 
little  of  it,  indeed,  much  deserved  to  survive.  Lockhart,  an 
exceedingly  judicious  critic,  thought  it  necessary  not  long  after  the 
appearance  of  Vanity  Fair  to  apologise  for  the  apparent  extrava- 
gance of  the  praise  which  he  had  given  to  his  friend  Theodore 
Hook  by  observing  that,  except  Dickens,  there  was  no  novelist  of 
the  first  class  between  the  death  of  Scott  and  the  rise  of  Thackeray 
himself.  But  about  the  time  of  that  rise,  and  for  a  good  many 
years  after  it,  what  may  be  called  the  third  generation  of  the 
novelists  of  the  century  began  to  make  its  appearance,  and,  as  has 
been  partly  observed  above,  to  devote  itself  to  a  somewhat  different 
description  of  work,  which  will  be  noticed  in  a  future  chapter. 

The  historical  novel,  though  some  of  its  very  best  representatives 
were  still  to  make  their  appearance,  ceased  to  occupy  the  first 
place  in  popular  esteem ;  and  the  later  varieties  of  the  novel  of 
more  or  less  humorous  adventure,  whether  in  the  rather  common- 
place form  of  Hook  or  in  the  highly  individual  and  eccentric  form 
of  Dickens,  also  ceased  to  be  much  cultivated,  save  by  Dickens 
himself  and  his  direct  imitators.  The  vogue  set  in  for  a  novel  of 
more  or  less  ordinary  life  of  the  upper  middle  class,  and  this  vogue 
lasted  during  the  whole  of  the  third  quarter,  if  not  of  the  second 
half,  of  the  century,  though  about  1870  the  historical  novel  revived, 
and,  after  some  years  of  uncertain  popular  taste,  seems  in  the 
last  decade  to  have  acquired  almost  as  great  popularity  (with  its 


Hi  MARRY  AT  157 

companion  study  of  purely  fantastic  adventure)  as  ever.  Yet  we 
must,  before  passing  to  other  departments,  and  interrupting  the 
account  of  fiction,  notice  not  a  few  other  writers  of  the  time 
previous  to  1850. 

The  descent,  in  purely  literary  merit,  from  Dickens  and 
Thackeray,  and  perhaps  from  Bulwer,  to  some  of  those  who 
must  now  be  mentioned,  is  great.  Yet  the  chief  naval  and  the 
chief  military  novelist  of  England  need  surely  not  appear  by 
allowance ;  and  if  affection  and  frequent  reading  count  for  any- 
thing, it  is  not  certain  that  some  technically  much  greater  names 
might  not  shine  with  lesser  lustre  than  those  of  Marryat  and 
Lever.  Frederick  Marryat,  the  elder  of  the  pair,  was  born  in 
1792,  early  enough  to  see  a  good  deal  of  service  in  the  later  years 
of  the  Great  War,  partly  under  the  brilliant  if  eccentric  leadership 
of  Lord  Cochrane.  His  promotion  was  fairly  rapid :  he  became 
a  commander  in  1815,  and  afterwards  distinguished  himself  as  a 
post  captain  in  the  Burmese  War,  being  made  a  C.B.  in  1825. 
But  the  increasing  dearth  of  active  service  was  not  suitable  to  a 
character  like  that  of  Marryat,  who,  moreover,  was  not  likely  to  be 
popular  with  "  My  Lords " ;  and  his  discovery  of  a  faculty  for 
writing  opened  up  to  him,  both  as  novelist  and  magazine  editor, 
a  very  busy  and  profitable  literary  career,  which  lasted  from 
1830  to  1848,  when  he  died.  Marryat's  works,  which  are  very 
numerous  (the  best  being  perhaps  Peter  Simple,  Mr.  Midshipman 
Easy,  and  Jacob  Faithful,  though  there  is  hardly  one  that  has  not 
special  adherents),  resemble  Smollett's  more  than  those  of  any 
other  writer,  not  merely  in  their  sea-scenes,  but  in  general  scheme 
and  character.  Some  of  Smollett's  faults,  too,  which  are  not 
necessarily  connected  with  the  sea — a  certain  ferocity,  an  over- 
fondness  for  practical  jokes,  and  the  like — appear  in  Marryat, 
who  is,  moreover,  a  rather  careless  and  incorrect  writer,  and 
liable  to  fits  both  of  extravagance  and  of  dulness.  But  the  spirit 
and  humour  of  the  best  of  his  books  throughout,  and  the  best 
parts  of  the  others,  are  unmistakable  and  unsurpassed.  Nor 
should  it  be  forgotten  that  he  had  a  rough  but  racy  gift  of  verse, 


158  TIIK  NEW  FICTION 


the  best,  though  by  no  means  the  only  good  example  of  which  is 
the  piece  beginning,  "The  Captain  stood  on  the  carronade." 

The  range  of  Charles  Lever,  who  was  born  in  1806,  was  as 
much  wider  than  Marryat's  as  his  life  was  longer  and  his  experi- 
ence (though  in  a  purely  literary  view  oddly  similar)  more  varied. 
He  was  educated  at  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  after  some  sojourn 
both  on  the  Continent  and  in  America  became  (1837)  physician 
to  the  British  Embassy  at  Brussels.  At  this  time  the  Continent 
was  crowded  with  veterans,  English  and  other,  of  the  Great  War ; 
while  Lever's  Irish  youth  had  filled  him  with  stories  of  the  last 
generation  of  madcap  Irish  squires  and  squireens.  He  combined 
the  two  in  a  series  of  novels  of  ,-onderful  verve  and  spirit,  first  of 
a  military  character,  the  chief  of  which  were  Harry  Lorrequer, 
C/iarles  O'Malley  (his  masterpiece),  and  Tom  Burke  of  Ours. 
He  had,  after  no  long  tenure  of  the  Brussels  appointment,  become 
(1842)  editor  of  the  Dublin  University  Magazine,  where  for  many 
years  his  books  appeared.  After  a  time,  when  his  stores  of  military 
anecdote  were  falling  low  and  the  public  taste  had  changed,  he 
substituted  novels  partly  of  Irish  partly  of  Continental  bearing 
(Roland  Cashel,  The  Knight  of  Gwynne,  and  many  others);  while 
in  the  early  days  of  Dickens's  All  the  Year  Round  he  adventured 
a  singular  piece  entitled  A  Day's  Ride,  a  Life's  Romance,  which 
the  public  did  not  relish,  but  which  was  much  to  the  taste  of 
some  good  judges.  He  had  by  this  time  gone  to  Florence, 
became  Vice-Consul  at  Spezzia  in  1852,  whence,  in  1867,  he  was 
transferred  as  British  Consul  to  Trieste,  and  died  there  in  1872. 

For  some  years  before  his  death  he  had  been  industrious  in 
a  third  and  again  different  kind  of  novel,  not  merely  more 
thoughtful  and  less  "  rollicking,"  but  adjusted  much  more  closely 
to  actual  life  and  character.  Indeed  Lever  at  different  times  of 
his  life  manifested  almost  all  the  gifts  which  the  novelist  requires, 
though  unfortunately  he  never  quite  managed  to  exhibit  them  all 
together.  His  earlier  works,  amusing  as  they  are  and  full  of  dash 
and  a  certain  kind  of  life,  sin  not  only  by  superficiality,  but  by  a 
reckless  disregard  of  the  simplest  requirements  of  story-telling,  of 


Hi  LEVER — MINOR  NOVELISTS  159 

the  most  rudimentary  attention  to  chronology,  probability,  and 
general  keeping.  His  later,  vastly  amended  in  this  respect,  and 
exhibiting,  moreover,  a  deeper  comprehension  of  human  character 
as  distinguished  from  mere  outward  "humours,"  almost  neces- 
sarily present  the  blunted  and  blurred  strokes  which  come  from 
the  loss  of  youth  and  the  frequent  repetition  of  literary  produc- 
tion. Indeed  Lever,  with  Bulwer,  was  the  first  to  exemplify  the 
evil  effects  of  the  great  demand  for  novels,  and  of  the  facilities 
for  producing  them  given  by  the  spread  of  periodicals. 

To  descend  to  the  third,  or  even  the  lower  second  class  in 
fiction  is  almost  more  dangerous  here  than  a  similar  laxity  in 
any  other  department ;  and  we  can  no  more  admit  Lord  John 
Russell  because  he  wrote  a  story  called  The  Nun  of  Arrouca,  than 
we  can  exhume  any  equally  forgotten  production  of  writers  less 
known  in  non-literary  respects.  It  can  hardly,  however,  be 
improper  to  mention  in  connection  with  Marryat,  the  greatest  of 
them  all,  some  other  members  of  the  interesting  school  of  naval 
writers  who  not  unnaturally  arose  after  the  Peace  had  turned 
large  numbers  of  officers  adrift,  and  the  rise  of  the  demand  for 
essays,  novels,  and  miscellaneous  articles  had  offered  temptation  to 
writing.  The  chief  of  these  were,  in  order  of  rising  excellence, 
Captains  Glascock,  Chamier,  and  Basil  Hall,  and  Michael  Scott, 
a  civilian,  but  by  far  the  greatest  writer  of  the  four.  Glascock,  an 
officer  of  distinction,  was  the  author  of  the  Naval  Sketch-Book, 
a  curious  olla-podrida  of  "  galley "  stories,  criticisms  on  naval 
books,  and  miscellanies,  which  appeared  in  1826.  It  is  not  very 
well  written,  and  is  in  parts  very  dull,  but  provides  some  genuine 
things.  Chamier,  who  was  born  in  1796  and  did  not  die  till 
1870,  was  a  post  captain  and  a  direct  imitator  of  Marryat,  as 
also  was  Captain  Howard,  Marryat's  sub-editor  for  a  time  on  the 
Metropolitan,  and  the  part  author  with  him  of  some  books  which 
have  caused  trouble  to  bibliographers.  Chamier's  books — Ben 
Brace,  The  Arethitsa,  Tom  Bowling,  etc. — are  better  than  Howard's 
Rattlin  tJic  Reefer  (commonly  ascribed  to  Marryat),  Jack  Ashton^ 
and  others,  but  neither  can  be  called  a  master. 


160  THE  NEW  FICTION 


Captain  Basil  Hall,  who  was  born  of  a  good  Scotch  family 
at  Edinburgh  in  1788,  and  died  at  Haslar  Hospital  in  1844, 
was  a  better  writer  than  cither  of  these  three ;  but  he  dealt 
in  travels,  not  novels,  and  appears  here  as  a  sort  of  honorary 
member  of  the  class.  His  Travels  in  America  was  one  ot 
the  books  which,  in  the  second  quarter  of  the  century,  rightly 
or  wrongly,  excited  American  wrath  against  Englishmen;  but  his 
last  book,  Fragments  of  Voyages  and  Travels,  was  his  most 
popular  and  perhaps  his  best.  Captain  Basil  Hall  was  a  very 
amiable  person,  and  though  perhaps  a  little  flimsy  as  a  writer, 
is  yet  certainly  not  to  be  spoken  of  with  harshness. 

A  very  much  stronger  talent  than  any  of  these  was  Michael 
Scott,  who  was  born  in  Glasgow  in  1789  and  died  in  1835,  having 
passed  the  end  of  his  boyhood  and  the  beginning  of  his  manhood 
in  Jamaica.  He  employed  his  experiences  in  composing  for 
Blackwood's  Magazine,  and  afterwards  reducing  to  book  shape, 
the  admirable  miscellanies  in  fiction  entitled  Tom  Cringle's  Log 
and  The  Cruise  of  the  Midge,  which  contain  some  of  the  best 
fighting,  fun,  tropical  scenery,  and  description  generally,  to  be 
found  outside  the  greatest  masters.  Very  little  is  known  of  Scott, 
and  he  wrote  nothing  else. 

One  unique  figure  remains  to  be  noticed  among  novelists  of 
the  first  half  of  the  century,  though  as  a  matter  of  fact  his  last 
novel  was  not  published  till  within  twenty  years  of  its  close. 
Benjamin  Disraeli,  Earl  of  Beaconsfield,  belongs,  as  a  special 
person,  to  another  story  than  this.  But  this  would  be  very  incom- 
plete without  him  and  his  novels.  They  were  naturally  written 
for  the  most  part  before,  in  1852,  he  was  railed  to  the  leadership 
of  the  House  of  Commons,  but  in  two  vacations  of  office  later  he 
added  to  them  Lothair  (1870)  and  Fndymion  (iSSi).  It  is,  how- 
ever, in  his  earlier  work  that  his  chief  virtue  is  to  be  found.  It 
is  especially  in  its  first  division, — the  stories  of  Vivian  Gtvv,  The 
Young  Duke,  Contarini  Fleming,  Alroy,  Venctia,  and  Ifcnrictta 
Temple, — published  between  1827  and  1837.  They  are  more  like 
Bulwer's  than  like  anybody  else's  work,  but  Vivian  Grey  appeared 


Ill  DISRAELI — PEACOCK  161 

in  the  same  year  with  Falkland  and  before  Pelham.  Later  novels 
—Coningsby  (1844),  Sybil  (1845),  and  Tancred  (1847) — are  more 
directly  political ;  while  certain  smaller  and  chiefly  early  tales — 
Ixion,  The  Infernal 'Marriage,  Popanilla,  etc. — are  pure  fantasy 
pieces  with  a  satirical  intent,  and  the  first  of  them  is,  with  perhaps 
Beckford's  Vathek  as  a  companion,  the  most  brilliant  thing  of  its 
kind  in  English.  In  these  more  particularly,  and  in  all  more  or 
less,  a  strong  Voltairian  influence  is  perceptible;  but  on  the 
whole  the  set  of  books  may  be  said  to  be  like  nothing  else.  They 
have  grave  faults,  being  sometimes  tawdry  in  phrase  and  imagery, 
sometimes  too  personal,  frequently  a  little  unreal,  and  scarcely 
ever  finally  and  completely  adjusted  to  the  language  in  which  and 
the  people  of  whom  they  are  written.  Yet  the  attraction  of  them  is 
singular ;  and  good  judges,  differing  very  widely  in  political  and 
literary  tastes,  have  found  themselves  at  one  as  to  the  strange 
way  in  which  the  reader  comes  back  to  them  as  he  advances  in 
life,  and  as  to  the  marvellous  cleverness  which  they  display.  Let 
it  be  added  that  Henrietta  Temple,  a  mere  and  sheer  love  story 
written  in  a  dangerous  style  of  sentimentalism,  is  one  of  the  most 
effective  things  of  its  kind  in  English,  and  holds  its  ground 
despite  all  drawbacks  of  fashion  in  speech  and  manners,  which 
never  tell  more  heavily  than  in  the  case  of  a  book  of  the  kind  ; 
while  in  Venetia  the  story  of  Byron  is  handled  with  remarkable 
closeness,  and  yet  in  good  taste. 

Two  other  novelists  belonging  to  the  first  half  of  the  century, 
and  standing  even  farther  out  of  the  general  current  than  did 
Disraeli,  both  of  them  also  possessing  greater  purely  literary  genius 
than  his,  must  also  be  mentioned  here.  Thomas  Love  Peacock, 
the  elder  of  them,  born  a  long  way  within  the  eighteenth  century 
(in  1785),  passed  a  studious  though  irregularly  educated  youth 
and  an  idle  early  manhood,  but  at  a  little  more  than  thirty  (1817) 
produced,  after  some  verse,  the  curious  little  satirical  romance  of 
Headlong  Hall.  This  he  followed  up  with  others — Melincourt, 
Nightmare  Abbey,  Maid  Marian,  The  Misfortunes  of  Elp/iin,  and 
Crotchet  Castle — at  no  great  intervals  until  1830,  after  which, 

M 


162  THE  NEW  FICTION 


having  in  the  meantime  been  appointed  to  a  lucrative  and 
important  office  under  the  East  India  Company,  he  published  no 
other  book  for  thirty  years.  Then  in  1860  he  put  forth  Gryll 
Grange,  and  some  five  years  later  died,  a  very  old  man,  in  1866. 
Peacock  at  all  times  was  a  writer  of  verse,  and  the  songs  which 
diversify  his  novels  are  among  their  most  delightful  features;  but 
his  more  ambitious  poetical  efforts,  which  date  from  his  earlier 
years,  T/ie  Genius  of  the  Thames  and  Rhododaphne,  are  not  of 
much  mark.  The  novels  themselves,  however,  have  a  singular 
relish,  and  are  written  in  a  style  always  piquant  and  attractive, 
and  latterly  quite  admirable.  They  may  all  be  described  as 
belonging  to  the  fantastic-satirical  order  of  which  the  French  tale- 

o      o 

tellers  (instigated,  however,  by  an  Englishman,  Anthony  Hamilton) 
had  set  the  example  during  the  previous  century.  Social, 
political,  economic,  and  other  fads  and  crazes  are  all  touched  in 
them ;  but  this  satire  is  combined  with  a  strictly  realistic  presenta- 
tion of  character,  and,  except  in  the  romances  of  Maid  Marian 
and  Elphin,  with  actual  modern  manners.  Peacock's  satire  is 
always  very  sharp,  and  in  his  earlier  books  a  little  rough  as  well ; 
but  as  he  went  on  he  acquired  urbanity  without  losing  point,  and 
became  one  of  the  most  consummate  practitioners  of  Lucianic 
humour  adjusted  to  the  English  scheme  and  taste.  Even  in 
1900  Gryll  Grange  had  not  become  wholly  obsolete  as  a 
picture  of  manners ;  while  Crotchet  Castle,  obsolete  in  a  few  exter- 
nals, is  as  fresh  as  ever  in  substance,  owing  to  its  close  grasp  of 
essential  humanity.  In  verse  Peacock  was  the  last,  and  one  of 
the  best,  of  the  masters  of  the  English  drinking-song;  and  some 
of  his  examples  are  unmatched  for  their  mixture  of  joviality,  taste, 
sense,  and  wit. 

George  Borrow,  who  was  eighteen  years  Peacock's  junior,  and 
outlived  him  by  fifteen,  was  a  curious  counterpart -analogue  to 
him.  Like  Peacock,  he  was  irregularly  educated,  and  yet  a  wide 
and  deep  student;  but,  unlike  Peacock,  he  devoted  himself  not  so 
much  to  the  ancient  as  to  the  more  out-of-the-way  modern  tongues, 
and  became  a  proficient  nut  merely  in  Welsh,  the  Scandinavian 


Ill  BORROW MISS  MARTINEAU  163 

tongues,  Russian,  Spanish,  and  other  literary  languages,  but  in 
Romany  or  Gipsy,  having  associated  much  with  the  "folk  of 
Egypt "  during  his  youth.  After  some  very  imperfectly  known 
youthful  experiences,  which  formed  at  least  the  basis  of  his  later 
novels,  Lavengro  (1851)  and  The  Romany  Rye  (1857),  he  received 
an  appointment  as  colporteur  to  the  Bible  Society,  first  in  Russia, 
then  in  Spain;  and  his  adventures  in  the  latter  country  formed 
the  basis  of  a  study  called  The  Gipsies  of  Spain  (1840),  which 
has  much,  and  a  volume  of  travel  and  autobiography,  The  Bible 
in  Spain  (1843),  which  has  unique,  interest.  Returning  home,  he 
married  a  wife  with  some  money,  and  spent  the  remainder  of 
a  long  life  in  his  native  county  of  Norfolk,  producing,  besides 
the  books  just  named,  Wild  Wales  (1862),  and  dying  in  1881. 
There  is,  in  fact,  not  very  much  difference  between  Sorrow's 
novels  and  his  travel  -  books.  The  former  had  at  least 
some  autobiographic  foundation,  and  the  latter  invest  actual 
occurrences  with  the  most  singular  flavour  of  romance.  For  his 
mere  style  Borrow  was  a  little  indebted  to  Cobbett,  though  he 
coloured  Cobbett's  somewhat  drab  canvas  with  the  most  brilliant 
fantastic  hues.  But  his  attitude,  his  main  literary  quality,  is  quite 
unique.  It  might  be  called,  without  too  much  affectation,  an 
adjustment  of  the  picaresque  novel  to  dreamland,  retaining 
frequent  touches  of  solid  and  everyday  fact.  Peacock's  style 
has  found  a  good  many,  though  no  very  successful,  imitators  ; 
Sorrow's  is  quite  inimitable. 

Harriet  Martineau,  one  of  the  numerous  writers,  of  both  sexes, 
whom  the  polygraphic  habits  of  this  century  make  it  hard  to 
"class,"  was  born  at  Norwich  in  1802,  and  belonged  to  one  of  the 
families  that  made  up  the  remarkable  literary  society  which 
distinguished  that  city  at  the  end  of  the  last  century  and  the 
beginning  of  this.  She  began  as  a  religious  writer  according  to 
the  Unitarian  persuasion  ;  she  ended  as  a  tolerably  active  opponent 
of  religion.  But  she  found  her  chief  vocation  (before,  as  she  did  in 
her  middle  and  later  days,  becoming  a  regular  journalist)  in  writing 
stories  on  political  economy,  a  proceeding  doubtless  determined 


164  THE  NEW  FICTION 


by  the  previous  exercises  in  didactic  story-telling  of  Miss  Edge- 
worth  and  Mrs.  Marcet.  These  Illustrations  of  Political  Economy 
(1832)  exactly  hit  the  taste  of  their  time  and  were  very  popular. 
Her  less  adulterated  children's  books  (of  which  the  best  perhaps  is 
Feats  on  the  Fiord]  and  her  novel  Decrbrook  (1839),  owing  much  to 
Miss  Edgeworth  in  conception,  display  a  good  faculty  of  narrative, 
and  she  did  a  great  deal  of  miscellaneous  work.  As  she  became 
less  religious  she  became  more  superstitious,  and  indulged  in 
curious  crazes.  She  lived  latterly  at  the  Lakes,  and  died  on  27th 
June  1876.  Harriet  Martineau  was  the  object  of  rather  absurd 
obloquy  from  Conservative  critics  as  an  advanced  woman  in  her 
day,  and  of  still  more  absurd  eulogy  by  .Liberal  sympathisers  both 
in  that  day  and  since.  Personally  she  seems  to  have  been  amiable 
and  estimable  enough.  Intellectually  she  had  no  genius ;  but 
she  had  a  good  deal  of  "the  versatile  talent  and  craftsmanship  for 
which  the  literary  conditions  of  this  century  have  produced  unusual 
stimulus  and  a  fair  reward. 

There  was  something  (though  not  so  much  as  has  been  repre- 
sented) of  the  masculine  element  about  Miss  Martineau  ;  a  con- 
temporary Miss  M.  was  delightfully  feminine.  Mary  Russell 
Mitford,  born  at  Alresford,  the  town  of  Wither,  on  i6th  December 
1786,  was  the  daughter  of  a  doctor  and  a  rascal,  who,  when  she 
was  a  child,  had  the  incredible  meanness  to  squander  twenty 
thousand  pounds  which  she  won  in  a  lottery,  and  later  the  constant 
courage  to  live  on  her  earnings.  She  published  poems  as  early 
as  1810;  then  wrote  plays  which  were  acted  with  some  success; 
and  later,  gravitating  to  the  London  Magazine,  wrote  for  it  essays 
only  second  to  those  of  Elia — the  delightful  papers  collectively 
called  Our  Village,  and  not  completed  till  long  after  the  death  of 
the  London  in  1832.  The  scenery  of  these  is  derived  from  the 
banks  of  the  Loddon,  for  the  neighbourhood  of  Reading  was  in 
various  places  her  home,  and  she  died  at  Swallowficld  on  loth 
January  1855.  Latterly  she  had  a  civil  list  pension  ;  but,  on  the 
whole,  she  supported  herself  and  her  parents  by  writing.  Not 
much,  if  anything,  of  her  work  is  likely  to  survive  except  Out 


MISS  MITFORD  165 


Village;  but  this  is  charming,  and  seems,  from  the  published  Life  of 
her  and  the  numerous  references  in  contemporary  biography,  to 
express  very  happily  the  character  and  genius  of  its  author — 
curiously  sunny,  healthy,  and  cheerful,  not  in  the  least  namby- 
pamby,  and  coinciding  with  a  faculty  of  artistic  presentation  of 
observed  results,  not  very  imaginative,  but  wonderfully  pleasing. 

To  these  authors  and  books,  others  of  more  or  less  "  single- 
speech  "  fame  might  be  added  :  the  vivid  and  accurate  Persian  tale 
of  Hajji  Baba  by  James  Morier,  the  Anastasius  of  Thomas  Hope, 
excellently  written  and  once  very  much  admired,  the  fashionable 
Granby  of  Lister  and  Tremaine  of  Ward,  the  striking  Salathiel  of 
Croly,  the  famous  Frankenstein  of  Mrs.  Shelley,  are  examples. 
But  even  these,  and  much  more  other  things  not  so  good  as 
they,  compose  in  regard  to  the  scheme  of  such  a  book  as  this 
the  numerus,  the  crowd,  which,  out  of  no  disrespect,  but  for 
obvious  and  imperative  reasons,  must  be  not  so  much  neglected 
as  omitted.  All  classes  of  literature  contribute  to  this,  but, 
with  the  exception  of  mere  compilations  and  books  in  science 
or  art  which  are  outgrown,  none  so  much  as  prose  fiction. 
The  safest  of  life  (except  poetry)  of  all  literary  kinds  when  it 
is  first  rate,  it  is  the  most  certain  of  death  when  it  is  not ;  and 
it  pays  for  the  popularity  which  it  often  receives  to-day  by  the 
oblivion  of  an  unending  morrow. 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE    DEVELOPMENT    OF    PERIODICALS 

PERHAPS  there  is  no  single  feature  of  the  English  literary  history 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  not  even  the  enormous  popularisation 
and  multiplication  of  the  novel,  which  is  so  distinctive  and 
characteristic  as  the  development  in  it  of  periodical  literature. 
For  this  did  not,  as  the  extension  of  novel-writing  did,  concern  a 
single  department  only.  The  periodical — it  may  almost  for  short- 
ness' sake  be  said  the  newspaper — not  only  became  infinitely 
multiplied,  but  gradually  absorbed  almost  every  department,  or 
a  share  of  almost  every  department,  into  itself.  Very  large 
numbers  of  the  best  as  well  as  of  the  worst  novels  themselves 
have  originally  appeared  in  periodicals  ;  not  a  very  small  pro- 
portion of  the  most  noteworthy  nineteenth  century  poetry  has  had 
the  same  origin  ;  it  may  almost  be  said  that  all  the  best  work  in 
essay,  whether  critical,  meditative,  or  miscellaneous,  has  thus  been 
ushered  into  tuc  world.  Even  the  severer  and  more  academic 
muses  —  history,  philosophy,  theology,  and  their  sisters,  have 
condescended  to  avail  themselves  of  this  means  of  obtaining  a 
public  audience  ;  and  though  there  is  still  a  certain  conventional 
decency  in  apologising  for  reprints  from  periodicals,  it  is  quite 
certain  that,  had  such  reprints  not  taken  place,  more  than  half 
the  most  valuable  books  of  the  age  in  some  departments,  and  a 
considerable  minority  of  the  ino.^t  valuable  in  others,  would  never 
have  appeared  as  books  at  all. 

The  first  division  of  our   time,   the   last   twenty   years   of  the 


CHAP,  iv  PERIODICALS  IN  1800  167 

eighteenth  century,  though  it  witnessed  a  very  great  development 
of  the  mere  newspaper,  with  which  we  have  little  to  do,  did  not 
see  very  much  of  this  actual  "  development  of  periodical  litera- 
ture "  which  concerns  us.  These  twenty  years  saw  the  last 
attempts  in  the  line  of  the  Addisonian  essay:  they  saw  the 
beginnings  of  some  modern  newspapers  which  exist  at  the  present 
day ;  they  beheld  in  the  Anti-Jacobin  perhaps  the  most  brilliant 
specimen  of  political  persiflage  in  newspaper  form  that  had  or 
has  ever  been  seen.  But  they  did  not  see^ — though  they  saw 
some  fumbling  attempts  at  it — anything  like  those  strangely 
different  but  mutually  complementary  examples  of  periodical 
criticism  which  were  given  just  after  the  opening  of  the  new  age 
by  The  Edinburgh  Review  (1802)  and  Cobbett's  Weekly  Register ; 
and  they  saw  nothing  at  all  like  the  magazine,  or  combination  of 
critical  and  creative  matter,  in  which  Blackwood  was,  some  years 
later,  to  lead  the  way.  At  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century 
such  magazines  were  in  an  exceedingly  rudimentary  state,  and 
criticism  was  mainly  still  in  the  hands  of  the  old  Monthly  and 
Critical  Reviews,  the  respective  methods  of  which  had  drawn  from 
Johnson  the  odd  remark  that  the  Critical  men,  being  clever,  said 
little  about  their  books,  which  the  Monthly  men,  being  "duller 
fellows,"  were  glad  to  read  and  analyse.  These  Reviews  and  their 
various  contemporaries  had  indeed  from  time  to  time  enjoyed 
the  services  of  men  of  the  greatest  talent,  such  as  Smollett  earlier 
and  Southey  just  at  the  last.  But,  as  a  rule,  they  were  in  the 
hands  of  mere  hacks  ;  they  paid  so  wretchedly  that  no  one,  unless 
forced  by  want  or  bitten  by  an  amateurish  desire  to  see  himself 
in  print,  would  contribute  to  them ;  they  were  by  no  means 
beyond  suspicion  of  political  and  commercial  favouritism  ;  and 
their  critiques  were  very  commonly  either  mere  summaries  or 
scrappy  "  puffs "  and  "  slatings,"  seldom  possessing  much  grace 
of  style,  and  scarcely  ever  adjusted  to  any  scheme  of  artistic 
criticism. 

This  is  a  history  of  literature,  not  of  the  newspaper  press,  and 
it  is  necessary  to  confine  ourselves  to  an  account  of  the  author? 


168  TIIK  DKVELOPMKNT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 


wlio  were  introduced  to  the  public  by — or  who,  being  otherwise 
known,  availed  themselves  of— this  new  development  of  periodicals. 
It  may  be  sufficient  to  say  here  that  the  landmarks  of  the  period, 
in  point  of  the  birth  of  papers,  are,  besides  the  two  above 
mentioned,  the  starting  of  the  Quarterly  Review  as  a  Tory 
opponent  to  the  more  and  more  Whiggish  Edinburgh  in  1809,  of 
the  Examiner  as  a  Radical  weekly  in  1808,  of  Black-wood's  Maga- 
zine as  a  Tory  monthly  in  1817,  of  the  London  Magazine  about 
the  same  time,  and  of  Eraser  in  1830. 

It  was  a  matter  of  course  that  in  the  direction  or  on  the  staff 
of  these  new  periodicals  some  of  the  veterans  of  the  older  system, 
or  of  the  men  who  had  at  any  rate  already  some  experience  in 
journalism,  should  be  enlisted.  Gifford,  the  first  editor  of  the 
Quarterly,  was  in  all  respects  a  writer  of  the  old  rather  than  of 
the  new  age.  Southey  had  at  one  time  wholly,  and  for  j^ars 
partly,  supported  himself  by  writing  for  periodicals  ;  Coleridge  was 
at  different  times  not  merely  a  contributor  to  these,  but  an  actual 
daily  journalist ;  and  so  with  others.  But,  as  always  happens 
when  a  really  new  development  of  literature  takes  place,  new 
regiments  raised  themselves  to  carry  out  the  new  tactics,  as  it 
were,  spontaneously.  Many  of  the  great  names  and  the  small 
mentioned  in  the  last  three  chapters — perhaps  indeed  most  of 
them — took  the  periodical  shilling  at  one  time  or  other  in  their 
lives.  But  those  whom  I  shall  now  proceed  to  mention — William 
Cobbett,  Francis  Jeffrey,  Sydney  Smith,  John  Wilson,  Charles 
Lamb,  Leigh  Hunt  as  a  prose  writer,  William  Hazlitt,  Thomas 
De  Quinrey,  John  Gibson  Lockhart,  and  some  others — were,  if  not 
exactly  journalists  (an  incorrect,  but  the  only  single  designation), 
at  any  rate  such  frequent  contributors  to  periodical  literature  of 
one  kind  or  another  that  in  some  cases  nothing,  in  most  com- 
paratively little,  would  be  left  of  their  work  if  contributions  to 
newspapers,  reviews,  and  magazines  were  to  be  excluded  from  it. 

William  Cobbett,  not  the  greatest,  but  the  most  singular  and 
original  of  the  group,  with  the  exception  of  Lamb,  and  as  superior 
to  Lamb  in  fertility  and  massive  vigour  as  he  was  inferior  to  him 


IV  COBBETT  169 

in  exquisite  delicacy  and  finish,  was  the  son  of  a  very  small  farmer 
little  above  the  labouring  rank,  and  was  born  near  Farnham  in 
1762.  He  was  first  a  ploughboy,  next  an  attorney's  clerk,  and 
then  he  enlisted  in  the  24th  regiment.  He  served  very  creditably 
for  seven  or  eight  years,  became  sergeant-major,  improved  himself 
very  much  in  education,  and  obtained  his  discharge.  But,  by  one 
of  the  extraordinary  freaks  which  mark  his  whole  career,  he  first 
took  it  into  his  head  to  charge  the  officers  of  his  regiment  with 
malversation,  and  then  ran  away  from  his  own  charge  with  his 
newly-married  wife,  first  to  France  and  then  to  America.  Here 
he  stayed  till  the  end  of  the  century,  and  here  he  began  his  news- 
paper experiments,  keeping  up,  in  Peter  Porcupine's  Journal,  a  violent 
crusade  against  French  Jacobins  and  American  Democrats.  He 
returned  to  England  in  June  1800,  and  was  encouraged  by  the 
Government  to  set  up  what  soon  became  his  famous  Weekly  Register 
— a  paper  which,  after  being  (as  Cobbett's  politics  had  been  up  to 
this  time)  strongly  Tory,  lapsed  by  rapid  degrees  into  a  strange  kind 
of  fantastic  Radicalism  shot  with  Tory  gleams.  This  remained 
Cobbett's  creed  till  his  death.  The  paper  was  very  profitable,  and 
for  some  time  Cobbett  was  able  to  lead  something  like  a  country 
gentleman's  life  at  Botley  in  Hampshire.  But  he  met  with  two 
years'  imprisonment  for  a  violent  article  on  flogging  in  the  army, 
he  subsequently  got  into  money  difficulties,  and  in  1817  he  made 
a  second  voyage  to  America,  which  was  in  fact  a  flight  both  from 
his  creditors  and  from  the  risk  of  another  Government  prosecution 
under  the  Six  Acts.  Through  all  his  troubles  the  Register,  except  for 
a  month  or  two,  had  continued  to  appear;  and  so  it  did  to  the  last. 
Its  proprietor,  editor,  and  in  the  main  author,  stood  for  Parliament 
several  times,  and,  after  a  trial  for  sedition  in  1831,  was  at  last 
returned  for  Oldham  in  1832.  He  was  not  much  of  a  success 
there,  and  died  on  iSth  June  1835  near  Guildford  ;  for  he  always 
clung  to  the  marches  of  Surrey  and  Hampshire. 

Some  such  details  of  Cobbett's  life  are  necessary  even  in  the 
most  confined  space,  because  they  arc  intimately  connected  with 
his  singular  character  and  his  remarkable  works,  These  latter  are 


170  TIIK  DEVELOPMENT  OK  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 


enormous  in  bulk  and  of  the  most  widely  diversified  character. 
Peter  Porcupine  fills  twelve  not  small  volumes  ;  the  mere  selections 
from  the  Register,  which  are  all  that  has  been  republished  of  it, 
six  very  bulky  ones  ;  with  a  wilderness  of  separate  works  besides — 
Rural  Rides,  a  History  of  the  Reformation,  books  on  husbandry, 
gardening,  and  rural  economy  generally,  some  on  the  currency,  an 
English  Grammar,  and  dozens  of  others.  Of  these  the  Rural 
Rides  is  the  most  interesting  in  matter  and  the  most  picturesque 
in  style,  while  it  affords  a  fair  panorama  of  its  author's  rugged 
but  wonderfully  varied  and  picturesque  mind  and  character;  the 
History  of  the  Reformation  is  the  most  wrong-headed  and  unfair; 
the  currency  writings  give  the  most  singular  example  of  the  delusion 
that  strong  prejudices  and  a  good  deal  of  mother-wit  will  enable 
a  man  to  write,  without  any  knowledge,  about  the  most  abstruse 
and  complicated  subjects  ;  the  agricultural  books  and  the  English 
Grammar  the  best  instances  of  genial  humours,  shrewdness,  and 
(when  crotchets  do  not  come  in  too  much)  sound  sense.  Hut 
hardly  anything  that  Cobbett  writes  is  contemptible  in  form,  how- 
ever weak  he  may  often  be  in  argument,  knowledge,  and  taste. 
He  was  the  last,  and  he  was  not  far  below  the  greatest,  of  the  line 
of  vernacular  English  writers  of  whom  Latimer  in  the  sixteenth, 
Bunyan  in  the  seventeenth,  and  Defoe  in  the  eighteenth  century, 
are  the  other  emerging  personalities.  To  a  great  extent  Cobbett's 
style  was  based  on  Swift ;  but  the  character  of  his  education, 
which  was  not  in  the  very  least  degree  academic,  and  still  more 
the  idiosyncrasy  of  his  genius,  imposed  on  it  almost  from  the 
first,  but  with  ever-increasing  clearness,  a  manner  quite  different 
from  Swift's,  and,  though  often  imitated  since,  never  reproduced. 
The  "  Letter  to  Jack  Harrow,"  the  "  Letter  to  the  People  of 
Botley,"  the  "Letters  to  Old  George  Rose"  and  that  to  "  Alexander 
Baring,  Loan  Monger,"  to  take  examples  almost  at  random  from 
the  Register,  are  quite  unlike  anything  before  them  or  anything 
after  them.  The  best-known  parody  of  Cobbett,  that  in  Rejected 
Addresses,  gives  rather  a  poor  idea  of  his  style, — exhibiting,  no 
doubt,  his  intense  egotism,  his  habit  of  half  trivial  divagation,  and 


iv  COBBETT  171 

his  use  of  strong  language,  but  quite  failing  to  give  the  immense 
force,  the  vivid  clearness,  and  the  sterling  though  not  precisely 
scholarly  English  which  characterise  his  good  work.  The  best 
imitation  to  be  found  is  in  some  of  the  anonymous  pamphlets  in 
which,  in  his  later  days,  Government  writers  replied  to  his  powerful 
and  mischievous  political  diatribes,  and  which  in  some  cases,  if 
internal  evidence  may  be  trusted,  must  have  been  by  no  mean 
hands. 

irrational  as  Cobbett's  views  were, — he  would  have  adjusted  the 
entire  concerns  of  the  nation  with  a  view  to  the  sole  benefit  of 
the  agricultural  interest,  would  have  done  away  with  the 
standing  army,  wiped  out  the  national  debt,  and  effected  a  few 
other  trifling  changes  with  a  perfectly  light  heart,  while  in 
minor  matters  his  crotchets  were  not  only  wild  but  simply 
irreconcilable  with  each  other, — his  intense  if  narrow  earnestness, 
his  undoubting  belief  in  himself,  and  a  certain  geniality  which  could 
co-exist  with  very  rough  language  towards  his  opponents,  would 
give  his  books  distinct  attraction  even  if  their  mere  style  were 
less  remarkable  than  it  is.  But  it  is  in  itself,  if  the  most  plebeian, 
not  the  least  virile,  nor  even  the  least  finished  on  its  own  scheme 
of  the  great  styles  in  English.  For  the  irony  of  Swift,  of  which, 
except  in  its  very  roughest  and  most  rudimentary  forms,  Cobbett 
had  no  command  or  indeed  conception,  it  substitutes  a  slogging 
directness  nowhere  else  to  be  found  equalled  for  combination  of 
strength  and,  in  the  pugilistic  sense,  "science"  ;  while  its  powers  of 
description,  within  certain  limits,  are  amazing.  Although  Cobbett's 
newspaper  was  itself  as  much  of  an  Ishmaelite  and  an  outsider  as 
its  director,  it  is  almost  impossible  to  exaggerate  the  effect  which 
it  had  in  developing  newspapers  generally,  by  the  popularity  which 
it  acquired,  and  the  example  of  hammer-and-tongs  treatment  of 
political  and  economic  subjects  which  it  set.  The  faint  academic 
far-off-ness  of  the  eighteenth  century  handling,  which  is  visible 
even  in  the  much-praised  Letters  offunius,  which  is  visible  in  the 
very  ferocity  of  Smollett's  Adventures  of  an  Atom,  which  put  up 
with  "Debates  of  the  Senate  of  Lilliput,"  and  so  forth,  has  been 


172  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

blown  away  to  limbo,  and  the  newspaper  (at  first  at  some  risk) 
takes  men  and  measures,  politics  and  policies,  directly  and  in  their 
own  names,  to  be  its  province  and  its  prey. 

It  is  a  far  cry  from  Cobbett  to  the  founders  of  the  Edinburgh 
Review,  who,  very  nearly  at  the  same  time  as  that  at  which  he 
launched  his  Register,  did  for  the  higher  and  more  literary  kind 
of  periodical  what  he  was  doing  for  the  lower  and  vernacular 
kind.  I  say  the  founders,  because  there  is  a  still  not  quite  settled 
dispute  whether  Francis  Jeffrey  or  Sydney  Smith  was  the  actual 
founder  of  the  famous  "  Blue  and  Yellow."  This  dispute  is  not 
uninteresting,  because  the  one  was  as  typically  Scotch,  with  some 
remarkable  differences  from  other  Scotchmen,  as  the  other  was 
essentially  English,  with  some  points  not  commonly  found  in  men 
of  English  blood.  Jeffrey,  the  younger  of  the  two  by  a  couple  of 
years,  was  still  a  member  of  the  remarkable  band  who,  as  has  been 
noticed  so  often  already,  were  all  born  in  the  early  seventies  of 
the  eighteenth  century ;  and  his  own  birthday  was  23rd  October 
1773.  He  was  an  Edinburgh  man  ;  and  his  father,  who  was  of  a 
respectable  though  not  distinguished  family,  held  office  in  the 
Court  of  Session  and  was  a  strong  Tory.  Jeffrey  does  not  seem 
to  have  objected  to  his  father's  profession,  though  he  early  revolted 
from  his  politics ;  and,  after  due  study  at  the  High  School  of  his 
birthplace  and  the  Universities  of  Glasgow,  Edinburgh,  and 
Oxford  (at  which  latter,  however,  he  only  remained  a  year,  deriving 
but  small  benefit  or  pleasure  from  his  sojourn  at  Queen's  College), 
he  was  called  to  the  Scottish  bar.  He  practised  at  first  with  very 
little  success,  and  in  1798  had  serious  thoughts  of  taking  up  literary 
life  in  London.  But  he  could  obtain  no  footing,  and,  returning  to 
Edinburgh  and  marrying  a  cousin,  he  fell  into  the  company  of 
Sydney  Smith,  who  was  there  with  a  pupil.  It  seems  to  be 
admitted  that  the  idea  of  a  new  Rcriew — to  be  entirely  free  from 
the  control  or  influence  of  publishers,  to  adopt  an  independent 
line  of  criticism  (independent,  but  somewhat  mistaken;  for  the 
motto  fittfcx  dd'iinatur  cum  twccns  ahsolritur  gives  a  very  one- 
sided view  of  the  critic's  officv),  and  to  be  written  for  fair  remunera- 


I  v  THE  EDINB  UR  GH  RE  VIE  W  173 

tion  by  persons  of  more  or  less  distinct  position,  and  at  any  rate 
of  education — originated  with  Sydney  Smith.  He  is  also  some- 
times spoken  of  as  the  first  "  editor,"  which  would  appear  to  be  a 
mistake.  At  first  (the  original  issue  was  in  October  1802)  the 
Review  appears  to  have  been  a  kind  of  republic — the  contributors 
being,  besides  Jeffrey  and  Sydney,  a  certain  Francis  Horner  (who 
died  too  soon  to  demonstrate  the  complete  falsity  of  the  golden 
opinions  entertained  of  him  by  his  friends),  Brougham,  and  some 
Professors  of  Edinburgh  University.  But  no  such  plan  has  ever 
succeeded,  though  it  has  been  more  than  once  tried,  and  very 
soon  accident  or  design  showed  that  Jeffrey  was  the  right  man  to 
take  the  command  of  the  ship.  The  Review  was  not  ostensibly 
a  political  one  at  first,  and  for  some  years  Tories,  the  greatest  of 
whom  was  Scott,  wrote  in  it.  But  the  majority  of  the  contributors 
were  Whigs,  and  the  whole  cast  of  the  periodical  became  more 
and  more  of  that  complexion,  till  at  last,  private  matters  helping 
public,  a  formidable  secession  took  place,  and  the  Quarterly  was 
founded. 

From  time  to  time  students  of  literature  turn  to  the  early 
numbers  of  these  famous  periodicals,  of  the  Edinburgh  especially, 
with  the  result,  usually  of  a  certain,  sometimes  of  a  considerable, 
disappointment.  With  the  exception  of  a  few  things  already  known 
from  their  inclusion  in  their  authors'  collected  works,  the  material 
as  a  whole  is  apt  to  seem  anything  but  extraordinarily  good ;  and 
some  wonder  is  often  expressed  at  the  effect  which  it  originally 
had.  This  arises  from  insufficient  attention  to  a  few  obvious,  but 
for  that  very  reason  easily  neglected,  truths.  The  inquirers  as  a 
rule  have  in  their  minds  much  more  what  has  followed  than  what 
has  gone  before  ;  and  they  contrast  the  early  numbers  of  the 
Edinburgh,  not  with  its  jejune  forerunners,  but  with  such  matured 
instances  as  Macaulay's  later  essays ;  the  early  numbers  of  the 
Quarterly^  not  with  the  early  numbers  of  the  Edinburgh,  but  with 
their  own  successors.  Again,  it  is  apt  to  be  forgotten  that  the 
characteristics  of  joint-stock  periodical -writing  make  as  much 
for  general  inequality  as  for  occasional  goodness.  That  which 


174  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

is  written  by  many  hands  will  seldom  be  as  bad,  but  can  never  be 
as  good,  as  that  which  is  written  by  one  ;  that  which  takes  its 
texts  and  starting-points  from  suggested  matters  of  the  moment 
will  generally  escape  the  occasional  dulness,  but  can  rarely  attain 
the  occasional  excellence,  of  the  meditated  and  original  sprout  of 
an  individual  brain. 

The  Edinburgh  of  the  early  years  was  undoubtedly  surpassed 
by  itself  later  and  by  its  rivals ;  but  it  was  a  far  greater  advance 
upon  anything  that  had  gone  before  it.  It  had  the  refreshing 
audacity,  the  fly-at-all  character  of  youth  and  of  intellectual 
opposition  to  established  ideas  ;  it  was,  if  even  from  the  first 
not  free  from  partisanship,  at  any  rate  not  chargeable  with  the 
dull  venal  unfairness  of  the  mere  bookseller's  hack  who  attacks 
Mr.  Bungay's  books  because  he  is  employed  by  Mr.  Bacon,  or 
vice  versa.  And  it  had  a  very  remarkable  staff,  comprising  the 
learning  and  trained  intelligence  of  men  like  Leslie  and  Playfair, 
the  unrivalled  wit  of  Sydney  Smith,  the  restless  energy  and 
occasional  genius  of  Brougham,  the  solid  profundity  of  Horner, 
the  wide  reading  and  always  generous  temper  of  Scott,  and  other 
good  qualities  of  others,  besides  the  talents  of  its  editor  Jeffrey 
himself. 

Of  these  talents  there  is  no  doubt,  though  they  were  initially 
somewhat  limited,  and  not  seldom  misdirected  afterwards.  Jeffrey's 
entire  energies  were  absorbed  by  the  Review  between  its  founda- 
tion and  his  resignation  of  the  editorship  after  nearly  thirty  years' 
tenure,  soon  after  which,  his  party  at  last  coming  into  power,  he 
was  rewarded  first  by  the  Lord  Advocateship  and  then  by  a  seat 
on  the  Bench.  He  made  a  very  fair  judge,  and  held  the  post 
almost  till  his  death  in  1850.  But  his  life,  for  the  purposes  of 
literature,  is  practically  comprised  between  1802  and  1829,  during 
which  he  was  far  more  than  titularly  the  guiding  spirit  of  the 
Rei'iew.  Recently,  or  at  any  rate  until  quite  recently  (for  there 
has  been  some  reaction  in  the  very  latest  days),  the  conception  of 
an  editor  has  been  of  one  who  writes  not  very  much,  and,  though 
choosing  his  contributors  with  the  best  care  he  can  give,  does  not 


iv  JEFFREY  175 

interfere  very  much  with  them  when  they  are  chosen.  This  was 
very  far  from  being  the  Jeffreyan  ideal.  He  wrote  a  great  deal, 
— -often  in  the  earlier  years  as  many  as  half  a  dozen  articles  in  a 
number, — and  he  "  doctored  "  his  contributors'  articles  (except  in 
the  case  of  persons  like  Sydney  Smith,  who  were  of  too  unconquer- 
able idiosyncrasy  and  too  valuable)  with  the  utmost  freedom.  At 
the  present  day,  however,  his  management  of  the  Review  is  less 
important  than  his  own  work,  which  he  himself  in  his  later  years 
collected  and  selected  in  an  ample  definitive  edition.  It  is 
exceedingly  interesting,  and  for  a  good  many  years  past  it  has 
been  distinctly  undervalued;  the  common,  though  very  uncritical, 
mistake  having  been  made  of  asking,  not  whether  Jeffrey  made  a 
good  fight  for  his  own  conclusions  from  his  own  premisses,  but 
whether  he  approved  or  disapproved  authors  whom  we  now  con- 
sider great.  From  this  latter  point  of  view  he  has  no  doubt  small 
chance.  He  began  by  snubbing  Byron,  and  did  not  change  his 
tone  till  politics  and  circumstances  combined  made  the  change 
obligatory ;  he  pooh-poohed  and  belittled  his  own  contributor 
and  personal  friend  Scott ;  he  pursued  Wordsworth  with  equal 
relentlessness  and  ill-success.  And  these  three  great  examples 
might  be  reinforced  with  whole  regiments  of  smaller  ones.  A 
more  serious  fault,  perhaps,  was  the  tone  which  he,  more  than  any 
one  else,  impressed  on  the  Review,  and  which  its  very  motto 
expressed,  as  though  an  author  necessarily  came  before  the  critic 
with  a  rope  about  his  neck,  and  was  only  entitled  to  be  exempted 
from  being  strung  up  spedali gratia.  This  notion,  as  presumptuous 
as  it  is  foolish,  is  not  extinct  yet,  and  has  done  a  great  deal  of 
harm  to  criticism,  both  by  prejudicing  those  who  are  not  critical 
against  critics,  and  by  perverting  and  twisting  the  critic's  own 
notion  of  his  province  and  duty. 

Nevertheless,  Jeffrey  had  great  merits.  His  literary  stand- 
point was  a  little  unfortunate.  Up  to  a  certain  extent  he  had 
thoroughly  sympathised  with  the  Romantic  movement,  and  he 
never  was  an  advocate  for  the  Augustan  period  in  English. 
But  either  some  curiosity  of  idiosyncrasy,  or  the  fact  that  Scott 


176  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

and  the  Lake  poets  were  all  in  different  ways  pillars  of  Toryism, 
set  him  against  his  own  Romantic  contemporaries  in  a  very  strange 
fashion.  Still,  in  some  ways  he  was  a  really  great  critic.  His 
faculty  of  summarising  a  period  of  literature  has  rarely  been 
equalled,  and  perhaps  never  surpassed  ;  he  had,  when  prejudice 
of  some  sort  did  not  blind  him,  an  extraordinary  faculty  of  picking 
out  the  best  passages  in  a  book ;  and,  above  all,  he  arranged  his 
critical  judgments  on  something  like  a  regular  and  co-ordinated 
system.  Even  his  prejudices  and  injustices  were  systematic ; 
they  were  linked  to  each  other  by  arguments  which  might  some- 
times be  questionable,  but  which  were  always  arguments.  And 
though,  even  when,  as  in  the  cases  of  Keats  and  Shelley,  his 
extra  -  literary  bias  was  not  present  to  conduct  him  wrong,  he 
showed  a  deplorable  insensibility  to  the  finer  strokes  of  poetry, 
he  was  in  general,  and  taking  literature  all  round,  as  considerable 
a  critic  as  we  have  had  in  English. 

Sydney  Smith  was  a  curious  contrast  to  Jeffrey  in  almost 
every  respect  except  in  politics,  and  even  there  the  resemblance 
was  rather  fortuitous  than  essential.  The  second  son  of  a  man 
of  eccentric  character  and  some  means,  he  was  born  in  1771,  was 
sent  to  Winchester,  and  proceeded  thence  to  New  College,  Oxford, 
where  he  became  Fellow  and  resided  for  a  considerable  time ; 
but  unusually  little  is  recorded  either  of  his  school  or  of  his 
college  days.  He  took  orders  and  was  appointed  to  a  curacy 
on  Salisbury  Plain,  where  the  squire  of  the  parish  took  a  fancy 
to  him  and  made  him  tutor  to  his  eldest  son.  Tutor  and  pupil 
went  to  Edinburgh,  just  then  in  great  vogue  as  an  educational 
centre,  in  1798;  and  there  Sydney,  besides  doing  clerical  duty, 
stumbled  upon  his  vocation  as  reviewer.  He  abode  in  the 
Scottish  capital  for  about  five  years,  during  which  he  married,  and 
then  removed  to  London,  where  he  again  did  duty  of  various 
kinds,  and  lectured  on  Moral  Philosophy.  When  the  Grenville 
administration  came  in,  he  received  a  fairly  valuable  Yorkshire 
living,  that  of  Foston.  Here,  after  a  time,  he  had,  owing  to  new 
legislation  about  clerical  absentees,  to  take  up  his  residence,  which 


IV  SYDNEY  SMITH  177 

involved  building  a  parsonage.  He  had  repaid  his  Whig  patrons 
by  writing  the  exceedingly  brilliant  and  passably  scurrilous  Letters 
of  Peter  Ply mley  on  Catholic  Emancipation,  and  he  reviewed  steadily 
for  the  Edinburgh,  as  indeed  he  did  during  almost  the  whole  editor- 
ship of  Jeffrey.  At  last  Lord  Lyndhurst,  a  Tory,  gave  him  a  stall 
at  Bristol,  and  he  was  able  to  exchange  Foston  for  Combe-Florey, 
in  the  more  genial  latitude  of  Somerset.  The  rest  of  his  life  was 
fortunate  in  worldly  ways ;  for  the  Reform  Ministry,  though  they 
would  not  give  him  a  bishopric,  gave  him  a  canonry  at  St.  Paul's, 
and  divers  legacies  and  successions  made  him  relatively  a  rich 
man.  He  died  five  years  before  Jeffrey,  in  February  1845. 

Besides  the  differences  of  their  Scotch  and  English  nationality 
and  education,  the  contrast  between  the  two  friends  and  founders 
of  the  "  Blue  and  Yellow  "  was  curiously  pervading.  Jeffrey,  for  all 
his  supposed  critical  savagery,  was  a  sentimentalist,  and  had  the 
keenest  love  of  literature  as  literature ;  Sydney  cared  very  little  for 
books  as  books,  and  had  not  a  grain  of  sentiment  in  his  composi- 
tion. Jeffrey  had  little  wit  and  no  humour ;  Smith  abounded  in 
both,  and  was  one  of  the  very  wittiest  of  Englishmen.  Even  in 
his  Revieiv  articles  he  constantly  shocked  his  more  solemn  and 
pedagogic  editor  by  the  stream  of  banter  which  he  poured  not 
merely  upon  Tories  and  High  Churchmen,  but  on  Methodists 
and  Nonconformists ;  his  letters  are  full  of  the  most  untiring  and 
to  this  day  the  most  sparkling  pleasantry;  and  his  two  chief  works 
outside  his  reviews,  the  earlier  Peter  Plymley's  Letters  and  the  later 
Letters  to  Archdeacon  Singleton  (written  when  the  author's  early 
Whiggism  had  crystallised  into  something  different,  and  when  he 
was  stoutly  resisting  the  attempts  of  the  Reformed  Government  to 
meddle  with  cathedral  establishments),  rank  among  the  capital 
light  pamphlets  of  the  world,  in  company  with  those  of  Pascal  and 
Swift  and  Courier.  The  too  few  remnants  of  his  abundant  con- 
versation preserve  faint  sparks  of  the  blaze  of  impromptu  fun  for 
which  in  his  day  he  was  almost  more  famous  than  as  a  writer. 
Sydney  Smith  had  below  this  surface  of  wit  a  very  solid  substratum 
of  good  sense  and  good  feeling  ;  but  his  literary  appeal  consisted 

N 


178  THK  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS 


almost  wholly  in  his  shrewd  pleasantry,  which,  as  it  has  been 
observed,  might  with  even  more  appropriateness  than  Coleridge 
said  it  of  Fuller,  have  been  said  to  be  "  the  stuff  and  substance  of 
his  intellectual  nature."  This  wit  was  scarcely  ever  in  writing — 
it  seems  to  have  been  sometimes  in  conversation — forced  or 
trivial  ;  it  was  most  ingeniously  adjusted  to  the  purpose  of  the 
moment,  whether  that  purpose  was  a  political  argument,  a  light 
summary  of  a  book  of  travels,  or  a  mere  gossiping  letter  to  a 
friend ;  and  it  had  a  quality  of  its  own  which  could  only  be 
displayed  by  extensive  and  elaborate  citation.  But  if  it  be 
possible  to  put  the  finger  on  a  single  note,  it  is  one  distinguishing 
Sydney  Smith  widely  from  Fuli?r  himself,  bringing  him  a  little 
nearer  to  Voltaire,  and,  save  for  the  want  of  certain  earnestness, 
nearer  still  to  Swift — the  perfect  facility  of  his  jokes,  and  the 
casual,  easy  man-of-the-worldliness  with  which  he  sets  them  before 
the  reader  and  passes  on.  Amid  the  vigorous  but  slightly 
ponderous  manners  of  the  other  early  contributors  to  the  Review, 
this  must  have  been  of  inestimable  value  ;  but  it  is  a  higher 
credit  to  Sydney  Smith  that  it  does  not  lose  its  charm  when 
collected  together  and  set  by  itself,  as  the  more  extravagant  and 
rollicking  kinds  of  periodical  humour  are  wont  to  do.  It  was 
probably  his  want  of  serious  preoccupations  of  any  kind  (for  his 
politics  were  merely  an  accident ;  he  was,  though  a  sincere 
Christian,  no  enthusiast  in  religion ;  and  he  had  few  special 
interests,  though  he  had  an  honest  general  enjoyment  of  life) 
which  enabled  Sydney  Smith  so  to  perfect  a  quality,  or  set  of 
qualities,  which,  as  a  rule,  is  more  valuable  as  an  occasional 
set-off  than  as  the  staple  and  solid  of  a  man's  literary  fare  and 
ware.  If  so,  he  points  much  the  same  general  moral  as  Cobbett, 
though  in  a  way  as  different  as  possible.  But  in  any  case  he  was 
a  very  delightful  person,  an  ornament  of  English  literature,  such 
as  few  other  literatures  possess,  in  his  invariable  abstinence  from 
unworthy  means  of  raising  a  laugh,  and,  among  the  group  of 
founders  of  the  new  periodical,  the  representative  of  one  of  its 
most  important  constituents — polished  persiflage. 


IV  ISAAC  DISRAELI  179 

The  other  contributors  of  the  first  generation  to  the  Edinburgh 
Review  do  not  require  much  notice  here ;  for  Brougham  was  not 
really  a  man  of  letters,  and  belongs  to  political  and  social,  not  to 
literary  history,  while  Mackintosh,  though  no  one  would  contest 
his  claims,  will  be  better  noticed  under  the  head  of  Philosophy. 
Nor  do  many  of  the  first  staff  of  the  Edinburgh's  great  rival, 
the  Quarterly,  require  notice ;  for  Gifford,  Canning,  Ellis,  Scott, 
Southey  have  all  been  noticed  under  other  heads. 

Two,  however,  not  of  the  absolutely  first  rank,  may  be 
mentioned  here  more  conveniently  than  anywhere  else — Sir 
John  Barrow  and  Isaac  Disraeli.  The  former  had  a  rather 
remarkable  career;  for  he  was  born,  in  1764,  quite  of  the  lower 
rank,  and  was  successively  a  clerk  in  a  workshop,  a  sailor,  a 
teacher  of  mathematics,  and  secretary  to  Macartney  on  his 
famous  embassy  to  China.  After  following  the  same  patron 
to  South  Africa,  Barrow,  at  the  age  of  forty,  became  Secretary 
of  the  Admiralty,  which  post  he  held  with  one  short  break  for 
more  than  forty  years  longer.  He  was  made  a  baronet  in 
1835,  and  died  in  1848.  Barrow  was  a  considerable  writer 
on  geography  and  naval  history,  and  one  of  the  pillars  of  the 
Quarterly.  Isaac  Disraeli,  son  of  one  Benjamin  of  that  name 
and  father  of  another,  seems  to  have  been  as  unlike  his  famous 
offspring  as  any  father  could  be  to  any  son.  Born  at  Enfield 
in  1766,  he  showed  absolutely  no  taste  for  business  of  any  kind, 
and  after  some  opposition  was  allowed  to  cultivate  letters.  His 
original  work  was  worth  little ;  indeed,  one  of  the  amiable  sayings 
attributed  to  his  friend  Rogers  was  that  Isaac  Disraeli  had  "  only 
half  an  intellect."  He  fell,  however,  pretty  early  (1/91)  into  an 
odd  but  pleasant  and  profitable  course  of  writing  which  amused 
himself  during  the  remainder  of  a  long  life  (he  died  blind  in  the 
same  year  with  Barrow),  and  has  amused  a  vast  number  of 
readers  for  more  than  a  century.  The  Curiosities  of  Literature, 
the  first  part  of  which  appeared  at  the  date  above  -mentioned,  to 
be  supplemented  by  others  for  more  than  forty  years,  were 
followed  by  the  Calamities  of  AutJiors  and  the  Qitarrels  oj 


i8o  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

Authors  (1812-14),  a  book  on  Charles  /.,  and  the  Amenities  of 
Literature  (1840).  Of  these  the  Curiosities  is  the  type,  and  it  is 
also  the  best  of  them.  Isaac  Disraeli  was  not  a  good  writer ; 
and  his  original  reflections  may  sometimes  make  the  reader 
doubt  for  a  moment  whether  Rogers  was  not  more  wrong  in 
granting  him  half  an  intellect  than  in  denying  him  a  whole  one. 
But  his  anecdotage,  though,  as  perhaps  such  anecdotage  is  bound 
to  be,  not  extremely  accurate,  is  almost  inexhaustibly  amusing, 
and  indicates  a  real  love  as  well  as  a  wide  knowledge  of  letters. 

The  next  periodicals,  the  founding  of  which  enlisted  or  brought 
out  journalists  or  essay-writers  of  the  true  kind,  were  BlackwoocFs 
Magazine,  founded  atEdinburgh  in  1817, and  \.\\&London Magazine, 
of  about  the  same  date,  the  first  with  one  of  the  longest  as  well  as 
the  most  brilliant  careers  to  run  that  any  periodical  can  boast  of, 
the  latter  as  short-lived  as  it  was  brilliant.  Indeed,  the  two  had 
an  odd  and — in  the  Shakespearian  sense — metaphysical  opposition. 
Scotland  and  England,  the  country  and  the  Cockney  schools, 
Toryism  and  Liberalism  (though  the  London  was  by  no  means  so 
thoroughgoing  on  the  Liberal  side  as  Blackwood  was  on  the 
Tory,  and  some  of  its  most  distinguished  contributors  were  either 
Tory,  as  De  Quincey,  or  neutral,  as  Lamb)  fought  out  their 
differences  under  the  two  flags.  And  by  a  climax  of  coincidence, 
the  fate  of  the  London  was  practically  decided  by  the  duel  which 
killed  John  Scott,  its  editor,  this  duel  being  the  direct  result  of 
an  editorial  or  contributorial  quarrel  between  the  two  periodicals. 

Both  these  magazines,  besides  being  more  frequent  in  appear- 
ance than  the  Edinburgh  and  the  Qifarferfy,  attempted,  as  their 
very  title  of  "  magazine "  expressed,  a  much  wider  and  more 
miscellaneous  collection  of  subjects  than  the  strict  "  review " 
theory  permitted.  From  the  very  first  Blackivood  gave  a  welcome 
to  fiction,  to  poetry,  and  to  the  widest  possible  construction  of  the 
essay,  while  in  almost  every  respect  the  London  was  equally 
hospitable.  Both  had  staffs  of  unusual  strength,  and  of  still  more 
unusual  personality  ;  and  while  the  London  could  boast  of  Charles 
Lamb,  of  Hazlitt,  of  De  Quincey,  of  Hood,  of  Miss  Mitford, 


IV  LAMB  181 

besides  many  lesser  names,  Black-wood  was  practically  launched 
by  the  triumvirate  of  Wilson,  Lockhart,  and  the  Ettrick  Shep- 
herd, with  the  speedy  collaboration  of  Maginn. 

The  eldest  of  these,  and  if  not  the  most  vigorous,  if  very 
nearly  the  least  prolific,  yet  the  most  exquisite  and  singular  in 
literary  genius,  was  Charles  Lamb.  He  also  was  of  the  "  Seventy 
Club,"  as  we  may  call  it,  which  founded  the  literature  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  and  he  was  born  in  London  on  i8th  February 
1775.  He  was  of  rather  lower  birth  than  most  of  its  other 
members  (if  membership  can  be  predicated  of  a  purely  imaginary 
body),  being  the  son  of  a  lawyer's  clerk  and  confidential  servant ; 
but  he  was  educated  at  Christ's  Hospital,  and  through  the  interest 
of  his  father's  employer  obtained,  at  the  age  of  seventeen,  a  post  in 
the  East  India  House,  which  assured  his  modest  fortunes  through 
life.  But  there  was  the  curse  of  madness  in  his  family,  and 
though  he  himself  escaped  with  but  one  slight  and  passing  attack 
of  actual  lunacy,  and  at  the  cost  of  an  eccentricity  which  only 
imparted  a  rarer  touch  to  his  genius,  his  elder  sister  Mary  was 
subject  to  constant  seizures,  in  one  of  which  she  stabbed  her 
mother  to  the  heart.  She  was  more  gently  dealt  with  than 
perhaps  would  have  been  the  case  at  present,  and  Lamb  under- 
took the  entire  charge  of  her.  She  repaid  him  by  unfailing  care 
and  affection  during  her  lucid  intervals  (which  were  long  and 
frequent),  and  by  a  sympathy  with  his  own  literary  tastes,  which 
not  seldom  made  her  a  valuable  collaborator  as  well  as  sympa- 
thiser. But  the  shadow  was  on  his  whole  life  :  it  made  it  im- 
possible for  him  to  marry,  as  he  evidently  would  have  done  if  it 
had  not  existed ;  and  it  perhaps  had  something  to  do  with  a 
venial  but  actual  tendency  on  his  part  to  take,  rather  fully,  the 
convivial  license  of  the  time.  But  Lamb  had  no  other  weakness, 
and  had  not  this  in  any  ruinous  degree.  The  quality  of  his 
genius  was  unique.  He  had  from  the  first  been  a  diligent  and 
affectionate  student  of  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  century  writers, 
and  some  of  his  first  literary  efforts,  after  some  early  sonnets 
(written  with  Coleridge  and  their  friend  Lloyd,  and  much  fallen 


182  THK  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

foul  of  by  the  Tory  wits  of  the  Anti-Jacobin\  were  connected  with 
these  studies.  He  and  his  sister  wrote  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
which,  almost  alone  of  such  things,  are  not  unworthy  of  the 
original.  He  executed  an  Elizabethan  tragedy,  John  Woodvil, 
which  is  rather  better  than  it  has  been  generally  said  to  be ;  and 
he  arranged  a  series  (or  rather  two)  of  scenes  from  the  Elizabethan 
drama  itself,  the  short,  interspersed,  critical  remarks  of  which, 
though  occasionally  a  very  little  fanciful,  contain  the  most  ex- 
quisitely sympathetic  criticism  to  be  found  anywhere  in  English 
literature. 

It  was  not,  however,  till  he  had  well  reached  middle  age  that 
the  establishment  of  the  London^  the  later  publishers  of  which, 
Taylor  and  Hessey,  were  his  friends,  gave  him  that  half  accidental, 
and  yet  it  would  seem  necessary,  opening  which  has  so  often  made 
the  fame  of  men  of  genius,  and  which  apparently  they  are  by 
no  means  often  able  to  make  for  themselves.  Lamb's  poems 
have  occasionally  an  exquisite  pathos  and  more  frequently  a 
pleasant  humour,  but  they  would  not  by  themselves  justify  a  very 
high  estimate  of  him  ;  and  it  is  at  least  possible  that,  if  we  had 
nothing  but  the  brief  critical  remarks  on  the  dramatists  above 
noticed,  they  would,  independently  of  their  extreme  brevity,  have 
failed  to  obtain  for  him  the  just  reputation  which  they  now  hold, 
thanks  partly  to  the  fact  that  we  have,  as  comments  on  them,  the 
Essays  of  Elia  and  the  delightful  correspondence.  This  latter, 
after  being  first  published  soon  after  Lamb's  death  in  1834  (nine 
years  after  he  had  been  pensioned  off  from  the  India  House),  by 
Mr.,  afterwards  Serjeant  and  Sir  Thomas  Talfourd,  has  been 
gradually  augmented,  till  it  has  at  last  found  an  excellent  and 
probably  final  editor  in  Canon  Ainger. 

It  is  in  these  two  collections  that  Lamb  presents  himself  in  the 
character  which  alone  can  confer  on  any  man  the  first  rank  in 
literature,  the  character  of  unicity — of  being  some  one  and  giving 
something  which  no  one  before  him  has  given  or  has  been.  The 
Essays  of  Elia  (a  nom  dc  guerre  said  to  have  been  taken  from  an 
Italian  comrade  of  the  writer's  cider  brother  John  in  the  South 


iv  LAMB  183 

Sea  House,  and  directed  by  Lamb  himself  to  be  pronounced 
"  Ell-ia  ")  elude  definition  not  merely  as  almost  all  works  of  genius 
do,  but  by  virtue  of  something  essentially  elvish  and  tricksy  in  their 
own  nature.  It  is  easy  to  detect  in  them — or  rather  the  things 
there  are  so  obvious  that  there  is  no  need  of  detection — an  extra- 
ordinary familiarity  with  the  great  "  quaint "  writers  of  the  seven- 
teenth century — Burton,  Fuller,  Browne — which  has  supplied  a 
diction  of  unsurpassed  brilliancy  and  charm  ;  a  familiarity  with 
the  eighteenth  century  essayists  which  has  enabled  the  writer  to 
construct  a  form  very  different  from  theirs  in  appearance,  but 
closely  connected  with  it  in  reality;  an  unequalled  command 
over  that  kind  of  humour  which  unites  the  most  fantastic  merri- 
ment to  the  most  exquisite  pathos ;  a  perfect  humanity  ;  a  cast  of 
thought  which,  though  completely  conscious  of  itself,  and  not  in 
any  grovelling  sense  humble  (Lamb,  forgiving  and  gentle  as  he 
was,  could  turn  sharply  even  upon  Coleridge,  even  upon  Southey, 
when  he  thought  liberties  had  been  taken  with  him),  was  a  thousand 
miles  removed  from  arrogance  or  bumptiousness ;  an  endlessly 
various  and  attractive  set  of  crotchets  and  whimsies,  never  divorced 
from  the  power  of  seeing  the  ludicrous  side  of  themselves  ;  a 
fervent  love  for  literature  and  a  wonderful  gift  of  expounding  it; 
imagination  in  a  high,  and  fancy  almost  in  the  highest  degree. 
But  when  all  this  has  been  duly  set  down,  how  much  remains 
both  in  the  essays  and  in  the  letters  !  These  in  fact  are  chiefly 
distinguished  from  one  another  by  the  fact  that  the  essays  are 
letters  somewhat  less  discursive  and  somewhat  in  fuller  dress,  the 
letters  essays  in  the  rough.  For  the  style  of  Lamb  is  as  indefinable 
as  it  is  inimitable,  and  his  matter  and  method  defy  selection  and 
specification  as  much  as  the  flutterings  of  a  butterfly.  One  thing 
he  has  always,  and  that  is  charm  ;  as  for  the  rest  he  is  an  epitome 
of  the  lighter  side  of  belles  Icttres,  and  not  always  of  the  lighter 
side  only. 

No  one  who  studies  Lamb  can  fail  to  see  the  enormous 
advantage  which  was  given  him  by  his  possession  of  an 
official  employment  affording  him  a  small  but  sufficient  income 


1 84  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS 


without  very  hard  labour.  Such  literary  work  as  his  could  never 
be  done  (at  any  rate  for  a  length  of  time)  as  "collar-work,"  and 
even  if  the  best  of  it  had  by  chance  been  so  performed,  it  muse 
necessarily  have  been  mixed,  as  that  of  Leigh  Hunt  is,  with  a  far 
larger  quantity  of  mere  work  to  order.  No  such  advantage  was 
possessed  by  the  third  of  the  great  trio  of  Cockney  critics,  cr  at 
least  critics  of  the  so-called  Cockney  school ;  for  jyiUiajoJHa/littj^ 
as  much  the  greatest  .of  English  critics  in  a  certain  way  as  Lamb 
is  in  another,  ;uul  Jrffivy  in  a  third  (though  ;i  lower  than  either), 
was  a  Cockney  neither  by  extraction  nor  by  birth,  nor  by  early 
sojourn,  nor  even  by  continuous  residence  in  later  life.  His  family 
was  Irish,  his  father  a  Unitarian  minister;  he  was  born  at 
Maidstone  in  1778.  When  his  father  was  officiating  at  Wem  in 
Shropshire,  in  Hazlitt's  twentieth  year,  Coleridge,  who  at  times 
affected  the  same  denomination,  visited  the  place,  and  Hazlitt 
was  most  powerfully  impressed  by  him.  He  was,  however^  divided 
between  art  and  literature  as  professions,  and  his  first  essays  were 
in  the  former,  which  he  practised  for  some  time,  visiting  the  Louvre 
during  the  Peace,  or  rather  armistice,  of  Amiens,  to  copy  pictures 
for  some  English  collectors,  and  to  study  them  on  his  own  account. 
Returning  to  London,  lie  met  Lamb  and  others  of  the  literary  set 
in  the  capital,  and,  after  some  newspaper  work,  married  Miss 
Stoddart,  a  friend  of  Mary  Lamb's,  and  a  lady  of  some  property. 
He  and  his  wife  lived  for  some  years  at  her  estate  of  Winterslow 
on  Salisbury  Plain  (long  afterwards  still  a  favourite  resort  of 
Hazlitt's),  and  then  he  went  in  1812  once  more  to  London,  where 
abundant  work  on  periodicals  of  all  kinds,  on  the  Liberal  side, 
from  daily  newspapers  to  the  Edinburgh  Review,  soon  fell  into 
his  hands.  But  after  a  time  he  gave  up  most  kinds  of  writing 
except  literary,  theatrical,  and  art  criticism,  the  delivery  of  lectures 
on  literature,  and  the  composition  of  essays  of  a  character 
less  fanciful  and  less  purely  original  than  Lamb's,  but  almost  as 
miscellaneous. 

He  lived  till  September  1830,  the  first  of  those  early  thirties 
of  the  nineteenth  century  which  were  to  be  as  generally  fatal  tohJs 


iv  HAZLITT  185 

generation  of  great  English  men  of  letters  as  the  seventies  of  the 
eighteenth  had  been  prolific  of  them  ;  and  his  dying  words,  "  Well, 
I  have  had  a  happy  life,"  are  noteworthy.  For  certainly  that  life 
would  hardly  have  seemed  happy  to  many.  He  quarrelled  with 
his  first  wife,  was  divorced  from  her  in  Scotland,  discreditably 
enough  ;  published  to  the  world,  with  astounding  lack  of  reti- 
cence, the  details  of  a  frantic  passion  for  Sarah  Walker,  a  lodging- 
house-keeper's  daughter,  who  jilted  him ;  and  after  marrying  a 
second  time,  was  left  by  his  second  wife.  He  had  never  been  rich, 
and  during  the  last  years  of  his  life  was  in  positive  difficulties, 
while  for  almost  the  whole  period  of  his  second  sojourn  in  London 
he  was  the  object  of  the  most  virulent  abuse  from  the  Tory  organs, 
especially  the  Quarterly  and  Black-wood— abuse,  which,  it  must  be 
confessed,  he  was  both  ready  and  able  to  repay  in  kind  with  hand- 
some interest.  He  appears  to  have  played  the  part  of  firebrand 
and  makebate  in  the  John  Scott  duel  already  referred  to.  Even 
with  his  friends  he  could  not  keep  upon  good  terms,  and  the 
sincere  gentleness  of  Lamb  broke  down  at  least  once,  as  the  easy 
good-nature  of  Leigh  Hunt  did  many  times,  under  the  strain  of 
his  perverse  and  savage  wrong-headedness. 

But  whether  the  critical  and  the  unamiable  temper  are,  as 
some  would  have  it,  essentially  one,  or  whether  their  combination 
in  the  same  person  be  mere  coincidence,  JHazh'jt .  was  beyond  all 

^question  a  great,  a  very  great,  critic — in  not  a  few  respects  our 
very  greatest.  All  his  work,  or  almost  all  that  has  much  merit,  is 
small  in  individual  bulk,  though  the  total  is  very  respectable. 
His  longest  book,  his  Life  of  Napoleon,  which  was  written  late  and 
as  a  counterblast  to  Scott's,  from  the  singular  stand-point  of  a 
Republican  who  was  an  admirer  of  Bonaparte,  has  next  to  no 
value;  and  his  earliest,  a  philosophical  work  in  eighteenth  century 
style  on  The  Principles  of  Human  Action,  has  not  much.  But  his 

__essays  and  lectures,  which,  though  probably  not  as  yet  by  any 
means  exhaustively  collected  or  capable  of  being  identified,  fill 

jiine  or  ten  volumes,  are  of  extraordinary  goodness.  They  may  be 
divided  roughly  into  three  classes.  The  first,  dealing  with  art  and 


iS6  TIIK  DEVELOPMKNT  OK  PKRIODICAT.S  CHAP. 


Jhe  drama,  must  take  the  lowest  room,  for  theatrical  criticism  is  oi 
necessity,  except  in  so  far  as  it  touches  on  literature  rather  than 
acting,  ot  very  ephemeral  interest ;  and  Hazlitt's  education  in  art 

jind  knowledge  of  it  were  not  quite  extensive  enough,  nor  the 
examples  which  in  the  first  quarter  of  this  century  he  had  before 
him  in  England  important  enough,  to  make  his  work  of  this  kind 
of  the  first  importance.  The  best  of  it  is  the  Conversations  with 
Northcote,  a  painter  of  no  very  great  merit,  but  a  survivor  of  the 
Reynolds  studio  ;  and  these  conversations  very  frequently  and 
very  widely  diverge  from  painting  into  literary  and  miscellaneous 
matters.  The  second  class  contains  the  miscellaneous  essays 
proper,  and  these  have  by  some  been  put  at  the  head  of  Hazlitt's 
work.  But  although  some  of  them,  indeed,  nearly  all,  display  a 
spirit,  a  command  of  the  subject,  and  a  faculty  of  literary  treat- 
ment which  had  never  been  given  to  the  same  subjects  in  the 
same  way  before,  although  such  things  as  the  famous  "  Going  to 
a  Fight,"  "  Going  a  Journey,"  "  The  Indian  Jugglers,"  "  Merry 
England,"  "Sundials,"  "  On  Taste,"  and  not  a  few  more  would, 
put  together  and  freed  from  good  but  less  good  companions,  make 
a  most  memorable  collection,  still  his  real  strength  is  not  here. 

Great  as  Hazlitt  was  as  a  miscellaneous  and  Montaignesque 
essayist,  he  was  greater  as  a  literary  critic.  Literature  was,  though 
he  coquetted  with  art,  his  first  and  most  constant  love ;  it  was  the 
subject  on  which,  as  far  as  English  literature  is  concerned  (and  he 
knew  little  and  is  still  less  worth  consulting  about  any  other),  he 
had  acquired  the  largest  and  soundest  knowledge ;  and  it  is  that 
for  which  he  had  the  most  original  and  essential  genius.  His 
intense  prejudices  and  his  occasional  inadequacy  make  them- 
selves felt  here  as  they  do  everywhere,  and  even  here  it  is 
necessary  to  give  the  caution  that  Hazlitt  is  never  to  be  trusted 
when  he  shows  the  least  evidence  of  dislike  for  which  he  gives  no 
reason.  But  to  any  one  who  has  made  a  little  progress  in  criticism 
himself,  to  any  one  who  has  either  read  for  himself  or  is  capable 
of  reading  for  himself,  of  being  guided  by  what  is  helpful  and  of 
neglecting  what  is  not,  there  is  no  greater  critic  than  Hazlitt  in  any 


iv  BLACKWOOD'S  MAGAZINE  187 

language.  He  will  sometimes  miss — he  is  never  perhaps  so  certain 
as  his  friends  Lamb  and  Hunt  were  to  find — exquisite  individual 
points.  Prejudice,  accidental  ignorance,  or  other  causes  may  some- 
times invalidate  his  account  of  authors  or  of  subjects  in  general. 
But  still  the  four  great  collections  of  his  criticism,  The  Characters 
of  Shakespeare,  The  Elizabethan  Dramatists,  The  English  Poets, 
and  The  English  Comic  Writers,  with  not  a  few  scattered  things  in 
his  other  writings,  make  what  is  on  the  whole  the  best  corpus  of 
criticism  by  a  single  writer  in  English  on  English.  He  is  the 
critics'  critic  as  Spenser  is  the  poets'  poet ;  that  is  to  say,  he  has, 
errors  excepted  and  deficiencies  allowed,  the  greatest  proportion 
of  the  strictly  critical  excellences — of  the  qualities  which  make  a 
critic — that  any  English  writer  of  his  craft  has  ever  possessed. 

Blackwootfs  Magazine,  the  headquarters,  the  citadel,  the  place- 
d'armes  of  the  opposition  to  the  Cockney  school  and  of  criticism 
and  journalism  that  were  Tory  first  of  all,  enlisted  a  younger  set  of 
recruits  than  those  hitherto  mentioned,  and  the  special  style  of 
writing  which  it  introduced,  though  exceedingly  clever  and  stimu- 
lating, lent  itself  rather  less  to  dispassionate  literary  appreciation 
than  even  the  avowedly  partisan  methods  of  the  Edinburgh.  In 
its  successful  form  (for  it  had  a  short  and  inglorious  existence  before 
it  found  out  the  way)  it  was  launched  by  an  audacious  "  skit " 
on  the  literati  of  Edinburgh,  written  by  John  Wilson,  John  Gibson 
Lockhart,  and  James  Hogg,  while  very  soon  after  its  establish- 
ment it  was  joined  by  a  wild  and  witty  Bohemian  scholar  from  the 
south  of  Ireland,  William  Maginn,  who,  though  before  long  he 
drifted  away  to  other  resorts,  and  ere  many  years  established  in 
Fraser  a  new  abode  of  guerilla  journalism,  impressed  on  Black- 
wood  itself,  before  he  left  it,  several  of  its  best-known  features,  and 
in  particular  is  said  to  have  practically  started  the  famous  Noctes 
Ambrosiance.  Of  Hogg  enough  has  been  said  in  a  former  chapter. 
For  the  critical  purpose  of  "Maga,"  as  Blackivood 's  Magazine  loved 
to  call  itself,  he  was  rather  a  butt,  or,  to  speak  less  despiteously,  a 
stimulant,  than  an  originator ;  and  he  had  neither  the  education 
nor  indeed  the  gifts  of  a  critic.  Of  each  of  the  others  some 


i88  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

account  must  be  given,  and  Maginn  will  introduce  yet  another 
flight  of  brilliant  journalists,  some  of  whom,  especially  the  greatest 
of  all,  Carlyle,  lived  till  far  into  the  last  quarter  of  the  present 
century. 

Wilson,  the  eldest  of  those  just  mentioned,  though  a  younger 
man  than  any  one  as  yet  noticed  in  this  chapter,  and  for  many 
years  the  guiding  spirit  (there  never  has  been  any  "editor"  of 
Blackwood  except  the  members  of  the  firm  who  have  published 
it)  of  Maga,  must  at  some  time  or  other  have  taken  to  literature, 
and  would  probably  in  any  case  have  sooner  or  later  written  the 
poems  and  stories  which  exist  under  his  name,  but  do  not  in  the 
very  least  degree  constitute  its  eminence.  It  was  the  chapter  of 
accidents  that  made  him  a  journalist  and  a  critic.  He  was  born 
in  1785,  his  father  being  a  rich  manufacturer  of  Paisley,  was 
educated  at  the  Universities  of  Glasgow  and  Oxford,  came  early 
into  a  considerable  fortune,  married  at  twenty-six,  and  having 
established  himself  at  Elleray  on  Windermere,  lived  there  the  life 
of  a  country  gentleman,  with  more  or  less  literary  tastes.  His 
fortune  being  lost  by  bad  luck  and  dishonest  agency,  he  betook 
himself  to  Edinburgh,  and  finding  it  impossible  to  get  on  with 
Jeffrey  (which  was  not  surprising),  threw  himself  heart  and  soul 
into  the  opposition  venture  of  Blackwood.  He  had,  moreover,  the 
extraordinary  good  luck  to  obtain,  certainly  on  no  very  solid 
grounds  (though  he  made  at  least  as  good  a  professor  as  another), 
the  valuable  chair  of  Moral  Philosophy  in  the  University  of  Edin- 
burgh, which  of  itself  secured  him  from  any  fear  of  want  or  narrow 
means.  But  no  penniless  barrister  on  his  promotion  could  have 
flung  himself  into  militant  journalism  with  more  ardour  than 
did  Wilson.  He  re-created,  if  he  did  not  invent,  the  Nodes 
AmbrosiancR — a  series  of  convivial  conversations  on  food,  drink, 
politics,  literature,  and  things  in  general,  with  interlocutors  at  first 
rather  numerous,  and  not  very  distinct,  but  latterly  narrowed  down 
to  "Christopher  North"  (Wilson  himself),  the  "  Ettrick  Shep- 
herd "  (Hogg),  and  a  certain  "  Timothy  Tickler,"  less  distinctly 
identified  with  Wilson's  mother's  brother,  an  Edinburgh  lawyer  of 


iv  WILSON  189 

the  name  of  Sym.  A  few  outsiders,  sometimes  real  (as  De 
Quincey),  sometimes  imaginary,  were,  till  the  last,  added  now  and 
then.  And  besides  these  conversations,  which  are  his  great  title 
to  fame,  he  contributed,  also  under  the  nom  de  guerre  of  Chris- 
topher North,  an  immense  number  of  articles,  in  part  collected  as 
Christopher  North  in  his  Sporting  Jacket,  substantive  collections 
on  Homer,  on  Spenser,  and  others,  and  almost  innumerable  single 
papers  and  essays  on  things  in  general.  From  the  time  when 
Lockhart  (see  below)  went  to  London,  no  influence  on  Blackwood 
could  match  Wilson's  for  some  ten  or  twelve  years,  or  nearly  till 
the  end  of  the  thirties.  Latterly  ill-health,  the  death  of  friends 
and  of  his  wife,  and  other  causes,  lessened  his  energy,  and  for 
some  years  before  his  death  in  1854  he  wrote  little.  Two  years 
before  that  time  his  increasing  ailments  caused  him  even  to  resign 
his  professorship. 

Wilson — whose  stories  are  merely  mediocre,  and  whose  poems, 
The  Isle  of  Palms  (1812)  and  The  City  of  the  Plague  (1816),  merely 
show  that  he  was  an  intelligent  contemporary  of  Scott  and 
Byron,  and  a  neighbour  of  the  Lake  poets — developed  in  his 
miscellaneous  journalism  one  of  the  most  puissant  and  luxuriant 
literary  faculties  of  the  time ;  and  in  particular  was  among  the 
first  in  one,  and  perhaps  the  very  first  in  another,  kind  of 
writing.  The  first  and  less  valuable  of  the  two  was  the  subjection 
of  most,  if  not  all,  of  the  topics  of  the  newspaper  to  a  boisterous 
but  fresh  and  vigorous  style  of  critical  handling,  which  bears 
some  remote  resemblance  to  the  styles  of  L'Estrange  towards 
the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and  Bentley  a  little  later, 
but  is  in  all  important  points  new.  The  second  and  higher 
was  the  attempt  to  substitute  for  the  correct,  balanced,  exactly- 
proportioned,  but  even  in  the  hands  of  Gibbon,  even  in  those 
of  Burke,  somewhat  colourless  and  jejune  prose  of  the  past  age, 
a  new  style  of  writing,  exuberant  in  diction,  semi  -  poetical  in 
rhythm,  confounding,  or  at  least  alternating  very  sharply  between, 
the  styles  of  high-strung  enthusiasm  and  extravagant  burlesque, 
and  setting  at  nought  all  precepts  of  the  immediate  elders.  It 


i go  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP 

would  he  too  much,  no  douht,  to  attribute  the  invention  of  this 
style  to  Wilson.  It  was  "in  the  air";  it  was  the  inevitable 
complement  of  romantic  diction  in  poetry ;  it  had  been  antici- 
pated to  some  extent  by  others,  and  it  displayed  itself  in  various 
forms  almost  simultaneously  in  the  hands  of  Landor,  who  kept 
to  a  more  classical  form,  and  of  De  Quincey,  who  was  modern. 
But  Wilson,  unless  in  conversation  with  De  Quincey,  cannot  be  said 
to  have  learnt  it  from  any  one  else  :  he  preceded  most  in  the  time, 
and  greatly  exceeded  all  in  the  bulk  and  influence  of  his  exercises, 
owing  to  his  position  on  the  staff  of  a  popular  and  widely-read 
periodical. 

The  defect  of  both  these  qualities  of  Wilson's  style  (a  defect 
which  extends  largely  to  the  matter  of  his  writings  in  criticism 
and  in  other  departments)  was  a  defect  of  sureness  of  taste,  while 
his  criticism  was  more  vigorous  than  safe.  Except  his  Toryism 
(which,  however,  was  shot  with  odd  flashes  of  democratic  senti- 
ment, and  a  cross-vein  of  crotchety  dislike  not  to  England  but 
to  Eondon),  he  had  not  many  pervading  prejudices.  But  at  the 
same  time  he  had  not  many  clear  principles  :  he  was  the  slave 
of  whim  and  caprice  in  his  individual  opinions ;  and  he  never 
seems  to  have  been  able  to  distinguish  between  a  really  fine 
thing  and  a  piece  of  fustian,  between  an  urbane  jest  and  a  piece 
of  gross  buffoonery,  between  eloquence  and  rant,  between  a 
reasoned  condemnation  and  a  spiteful  personal  fling.  Accord- 
ingly the  ten  reprinted  volumes  of  his  contributions  to  Blacku'ood 
and  the  mass  of  his  still  uncollected  articles  contain  the  strangest 
jumble  of  good  and  bad  in  matter  and  form  that  exists  anywhere. 
By  turns  trivial  and  magnificent,  exquisite  and  disgusting,  a 
hierophant  of  literature  and  a  mere  railer  at  men  of  letters,  a 
prince  of  describers,  jesters,  enthusiasts,  and  the  author  of 
tedious  and  commonplace  newspaper  "copy,"  Wilson  is  one 
of  the  most  unequal,  one  of  the  most  puzzling,  but  also  one  of 
the  most  stimulating  and  delightful  figures  in  English  literature. 
Perhaps  slightly  over-valued  for  a  time,  he  has  for  many  years 
been  distinctly  neglected,  if  not  depreciated  and  despised ;  and 


IV  LOCKHART  191 

the  voluminousness  of  his  work,  coupled  with  the  fact  that  it  is 
difficult  to  select  from  it  owing  to  the  pervading  inequality  of 
its  merits,  may  be  thought  likely  to  keep  him  in  the  general 
judgment  at  a  lower  plane  than  he  deserves.  But  the  influence 
which  he  exerted  during  many  years,  both  upon  writers  and 
readers,  by  his  work  in  Blackwood  cannot  be  over-estimated. 
And  it  may  be  said  without  fear  that  no  one  with  tolerably  wide 
sympathies,  who  is  able  to  appreciate  good  literature,  will  ever 
seriously  undertake  the  reading  of  his  various  works  without 
equal  satisfaction  and  profit. 

Wilson's  principal  coadjutor  in  the  early  days  of  Blackwood, 
and  his  friend  of  all  days  (though  the  mania  for  crying  down  not 
so  much  England  as  London  made  "  Christopher  North  "  indulge 
in  some  girds  at  his  old  comrade's  editorship  of  the  Quarterly}, 
was  a  curious  contrast  to  Wilson  himself.  This  contrast  may 
have  been  due  partly,  but  by  no  means  wholly,  to  the  fact  that 
there  was  ten  years  between  them.  John  Gibson  Lockhart  was 
born  at  Cambusnethan,  where  his  father  was  minister,  on  i4th 
July  1794.  Like  Wilson,  he  was  educated  at  Glasgow  and 
at  Oxford,  where  he  took  a  first-class  at  a  very  early  age,  and 
whence  he  went  to  Germany,  a  completion  of  "  study-years " 
which  the  revolutionary  wars  had  for  a  long  time  rendered 
difficult,  if  not  dangerous.  On  returning  home  he  was  called 
to  the  Scottish  Bar,  where  it  would  seem  that  he  might  have 
made  some  figure,  but  for  his  inability  to  speak  in  public. 
Blackwood  gave  him  the  very  opening  suited  to  his  genius  ;  and 
for  years  he  was  one  of  its  chief  contributors,  and  perhaps  the 
most  dangerous  wielder  of  the  pretty  sharp  weapons  in  which 
its  staff  indulged.  Shortly  afterwards,  in  1819,  he  published 
(perhaps  with  some  slight  assistance  from  Wilson)  his  first  original 
book  (he  had  translated  Schlegel's  Lectures  on  History  earlier), 
Peter's  Letters  to  his  Kinsfolk.  The  title  was  a  parody  on  Scott's 
account  of  his  continental  journey  after  Waterloo,  the  substance 
an  exceedingly  vivacious  account  of  the  things  and  men  of 
Edinburgh  at  the  time,  something  after  the  fashion  of  Humphrey 


192  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP 

Clinker.  Next  year,  on  291)1  April,  Lockhart  married  Sophia, 
Scott's  elder  daughter ;  and  the  pair  lived  for  some  years  to 
come  either  in  Edinburgh  or  at  the  cottage  of  Chiefswood,  near 
Abbotsford,  Lockhart  contributing  freely  to  Blackwood,  and 
writing  his  four  novels  and  his  Spanish  Ballads.  At  the  end 
of  1825  or  the  beginning  of  1826,  just  at  the  time  when  his 
father-in-law's  financial  troubles  set  in,  he  received  the  appoint- 
ment of  editor  of  the  Quarterly  Review  in  succession,  though 
not  in  immediate  succession,  to  Gifford.  He  then  removed  to 
London,  where  he  continued  to  direct  the  Review,  to  contribute 
for  a  time  to  Fraser,  to  be  a  very  important  figure  in  literary  and 
political  life,  and  after  Scott's  aeath  to  write  an  admirable  Life. 
Domestic  troubles  came  rather  thickly  on  him  after  Scott's  death, 
which  indeed  was  preceded  by  that  of  Lockhart's  own  eldest 
son,  the  "Hugh  Littlejohn"  of  the  Tales  of  a  Grandfather.  Mrs. 
Lockhart  herself  died  in  1837.  In  1843  Lockhart  received  the 
auditorship  of  the  Duchy  of  Lancaster,  a  post  of  some  value. 
Ten  years  later,  in  broken  health,  he  resigned  the  editorship  of 
the  Quarterly,  and  died  towards  the  end  of  the  year. 

Lockhart's  works,  at  present  uncollected,  and  perhaps  in  nc 
small  proportion  irrecoverable,  must  have  been  of  far  greater 
bulk  than  those  of  any  one  yet  mentioned  in  this  chapter  except 
Wilson,  and  not  inconsiderably  greater  than  his.  They  are  also 
of  a  remarkable  variety,  and  of  an  extraordinary  level  of  excellence 
in  their  different  kinds.  Lockhart  was  not,  like  Wilson,  an 
advocate  or  a  practitioner  of  very  ornate  or  revolutionary  prose. 
On  the  contrary,  he  both  practised,  preached,  and  most  for- 
midably defended  by  bitter  criticism  of  opposite  styles,  a  manner 
in  prose  and  verse  which  was  almost  classical,  or  which  at  least 
admitted  no  further  romantic  innovation  than  that  of  the  Lake 
poets  and  Scott.  His  authorship  of  the  savage  onslaught  upon 
Keats  in  Blackwood  is  not  proven ;  but  there  is  no  doubt  that 
he  wrote  the  scarcely  less  ferocious,  though  much  more  dis- 
criminating and  better  deserved,  attack  on  Tennyson's  early  poems 
in  the  Quarterly,  He  was  himself  no  mean  writer  of  verse.  His 


LOCKHART  193 


Spanish  Ballads  (1823),  in  which  he  had  both  Southey  and  Scott 
as  models  before  him,  are  of  great  excellence ;  and  some  of  his 
occasional  pieces  display  not  merely  much  humour  (which  nobody 
ever  denied  him),  but  no  mean  share  of  the  feeling  which  is 
certainly  not  often  associated  with  his  name.  But  verse  was 
only  an  occasional  pastime  with  him  :  his  vocation  was  to  write 
prose,  and  he  wrote  it  with  admirable  skill  and  a  seldom  sur- 
passed faculty  of  adaptation  to  the  particular  task.  It  is  indeed 
probable — and  it  would  be  no  discredit  to  him — that  his  reputa- 
tion with  readers  as  opposed  to  students  will  mainly  depend,  as 
it  depends  at  present,  upon  his  Life  of  Scott.  Nor  would  even 
thus  his  plumes  be  borrowed  over  much.  For  though,  no  doubt, 
the  Letters  and  the  Diary  of  Sir  Walter  himself  count  for  much 
in  the  interest  of  the  book,  though  the  beauty  and  nobility  of 
Scott's  character,  his  wonderful  achievements,  the  pathetic 
revolution  of  his  fortune,  form  a  subject  not  easily  matched, 
yet  to  be  equal  to  such  a  subject  is  to  be  in  another  sense  on 
an  equality  with  it.  Admiration  for  the  book  is  not  chequered 
or  tempered,  as  it  almost  necessarily  must  be  in  the  case  of  its 
only  possible  rival,  Bos  well's  y"0A#.w>«,  with  more  or  less  contempt 
for  the  author;  still  less  is  it  (as  some  have  contended  that 
admiration  for  Boswell  is)  due  to  that  contempt.  The  taste  and 
spirit  of  Lockhart's  book  are  not  less  admirable  than  the  skill  of 
its  arrangement  and  the  competency  of  its  writing;  nor  would 
it  be  easily  possible  to  find  a  happier  adjustment  in  this  respect 
in  the  whole  annals  of  biography. 

But  this  great  book  ought  not  to  obscure  the  other  work 
which  Lockhart  has  done.  His  biography  of  Burns  is  of  re- 
markable merit ;  it  may  be  questioned  whether  to  this  day, 
though  it  may  be  deficient  in  a  few  modern  discoveries  of  fact 
(and  these  have  been  mostly  supplied  in  the  edition  by  the  late 
Mr.  Scott  Douglas),  it  is  not  the  best  book  on  the  subject.  The 
taste  and  judgment,  the  clear  vision  and  sound  sense,  which 
distinguished  Lockhart,  are  in  few  places  more  apparent  than 
here.  His  abridgment  of  Scott's  Life  of  Napoleon  is  no  ordinary 

o 


I94  THE   DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS 


abridgment,  and  is  a  work  of  thorough  craft,  if  not  even  of  art. 
His  novels,  with  one  exception,  have  ceased  to  be  much  read ; 
and  perhaps  even  that  one  can  hardly  be  said  to  enjoy  frequent 
perusal.  Valerius,  the  first,  is  a  classical  novel,  and  suffers 
under  the  drawbacks  which  have  generally  attended  its  kind. 
Reginald  Da/ton,  a  novel  in  part  of  actual  life  at  Oxford,  and 
intended  to  be  wholly  of  actual  life,  still  shows  something  of  the 
artificial  handling,  of  the  supposed  necessity  for  adventure,  which 
is  observable  in  Hook  and  others  of  the  time,  and  which  has 
been  sufficiently  noticed  in  the  last  chapter.  Matthew  Wald, 
the  last  of  the  four,  is  both  too  gloomy  and  too  extravagant :  it 
deals  with  a  mad  hero.  But  Adam  Blair,  which  was  published 
in  the  same  year  (1821)  with  Valerius,  is  a  wonderful  little  book. 
The  story  is  not  well  told ;  but  the  characters  and  the  principal 
situation — a  violent  passion  entertained  by  a  pious  widowed 
minister  for  his  neighbour's  wife — are  handled  with  extraordinary 
power.  Peter's  Letters,  which  is  half  a  book  and  half  journalism, 
may  be  said  to  be,  with  rare  exceptions  (such  as  an  obituary 
article  on  Hook,  which  was  reprinted  from  the  Quarterly'],  the 
only  specimen  of  Lockhart's  miscellaneous  writing  that  is  easily 
accessible  or  authentically  known.  He  was  still  but  in  his 
apprenticeship  here ;  but  his  remarkable  gifts  are  already 
apparent.  These  gifts  included  a  faculty  of  sarcastic  comment 
so  formidable  that  it  early  earned  him  the  title  of  "  the  Scorpion  "  ; 
a  very  wide  and  sound  knowledge  of  literature,  old  and  new, 
English  and  foreign ;  some  acquirements  in  art  and  in  other 
matters  ;  an  excellent  style,  and  a  solid  if  rather  strait-laced  theory 
of  criticism.  Except  that  he  was,  as  almost  everybody  was  then, 
too  much  given  to  violent  personalities  in  his  anonymous  work, 
lie  was  a  very  great  journalist  indeed,  and  he  was  also  a  very 
great  man  of  letters. 

Thomas  de  Quinrey  was  not  of  the  earliest  Blackwood  staff  (in 
that  respect  Maginn  should  be  mentioned  before  him),  but  he  was 
the  older  as  well  as  the  more  important  man  of  the  two.  and 
there  is  the  additional  reason  for  postponing  the  founder  of 


iv  DE  QUINCEY  195 

Fraser,  that  this  latter  periodical  introduced  a  fresh  flight  of 
birds  of  passage  (as  journalists  both  fortunate  and  unfortunate 
may  peculiarly  be  called)  to  English  literature.  De  Quincey  was 
born  in  1785  (the  same  year  as  his  friend  Wilson)  at  Manchester, 
where  his  father  was  a  merchant  of  means.  He  was  educated  at 
the  Grammar  School  of  his  native  town,  after  some  preliminary 
teaching  at  or  near  Bath,  whither  his  mother  had  moved  after 
his  father's  death.  He  did  not  like  Manchester,  and  when  he 
had  nearly  served  his  time  for  an  exhibition  to  Brasenose  College, 
Oxford,  he  ran  away  and  hid  himself.  He  went  to  Oxford  after  all, 
entering  at  Worcester,  where  he  made  a  long  though  rather  inter- 
mittent residence,  but  took  no  degree.  In  1809  he  took  up  his 
abode  at  Grasmere,  married  after  a  time,  and  lived  there,  at  least 
as  his  headquarters,  for  more  than  twenty  years.  In  1830  he 
moved  to  Edinburgh,  where,  or  in  its  neighbourhood,  he  resided 
for  the  rest  of  his  long  life,  and  where  he  died  in  December  1859. 
He  has  given  various  autobiographic  handlings  of  this  life — in 
the  main  it  would  seem  quite  trustworthy,  but  invested  with  an 
air  of  fantastic  unreality  by  his  manner  of  relation. 

His  life,  however,  and  his  personality,  and  even  the  whole  of 
his  voluminous  published  work,  have  in  all  probability  taken 
colour  in  the  general  thought  from  his  first  literary  work  of  any 
consequence,  the  wonderful  Confessions  of  an  English  Opium 
Eater,  which,  with  the  Essays  of  Elia,  were  the  chief  flowers  of 
the  London  Magazine,  and  appeared  in  that  periodical  during  the 
year  1821.  He  had  acquired  this  habit  during  his  sojourn  at 
Oxford,  and  it  had  grown  upon  him  during  his  at  first  solitary 
residence  at  the  Lakes  to  an  enormous  extent.  Until  he  thus 
committed  the  results  of  his  dreams,  or  of  his  fancy  and  literary 
genius  working  on  his  dreams,  or  of  his  fancy  and  genius  by 
themselves,  to  print  and  paper,  in  his  thirty-sixth  year,  he  had 
been,  though  a  great  reader,  hardly  anything  of  a  writer.  But 
thenceforward,  and  especially  after,  in  1825,  he  had  visited  his 
Lake  neighbour  Wilson  at  Edinburgh,  and  had  been  by  him 
introduced  to  Blackivood,  he  became  a  frequent  contributor  to 


196  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

different  magazines,  and  continued  to  be  so,  writing  far  more 
even  than  he  published,  till  his  death.  He  wrote  very  few  books, 
the  chief  being  a  very  free  translation  of  a  German  novel,  forged 
as  Scott's,  and  called  Wattadmor ;  a  more  original  and  stable, 
though  not  very  brilliant,  effort  in  fiction,  entitled  Klosterheim  ;  and 
the  Logic  of  Political  Economy.  Towards  the  end  of  his  life  he 
superintended  an  English  collection — there  had  already  been  one 
in  America — of  his  essays,  and  this  has  been  supplemented  more 
than  once  since. 

It  may,  indeed,  fairly  be  doubted  whether  so  large  a  collec- 
tion of  miscellaneous,  heterogeneous,  and,  to  tell  the  truth,  very 
unequally  interesting  and  meritorious  matter  has  ever  been 
received  with  greater  or  more  lasting  popular  favour,  a  fresh 
edition  of  the  fourteen  or  sixteen  volumes  of  the  Works  having 
been  called  for  on  an  average  every  decade.  There  have  been 
dissidents ;  and  recently  in  particular  something  of  a  set  has  been 
made  against  De  Quincey — a  set  to  some  extent  helped  by  the 
gradual  addition  to  the  Works  of  a  great  deal  of  unimportant 
matter  which  he  had  not  himself  cared  to  reproduce.  This,  in- 
deed, is  perhaps  the  greatest  danger  to  which  the  periodical 
writer  is  after  his  death  exposed,  and  is  even  the  most  serious 
drawback  to  periodical  writing.  It  is  impossible  that  any  man 
who  lives  by  such  writing  can  always  be  at  his  best  in  form,  and 
he  will  sometimes  be  compelled  to  execute  what  Carlyle  has 
called  "honest  journey-work  in  default  of  better," — work  which, 
though  perfectly  honest  and  perfectly  respectable,  is  mere  journey- 
work,  and  has  no  claim  to  be  disturbed  from  its  rest  when  its 
journey  is  accomplished.  Of  this  there  was  some  even  in  De 
Quincey's  own  collection,  and  the  proportion  has  been  much 
increased  since.  Moreover,  even  at  his  very  best,  he  was  not  a 
writer  who  could  be  trusted  to  keep  himself  at  that  best.  His 
reading  was  enormous,  —  nearly  as  great  perhaps  as  Southey's, 
though  in  still  less  popular  directions, — and  he  would  sometimes 
drag  it  in  rather  inappropriately.  He  had  an  unconquerable 
and  sometimes  very  irritating  habit  of  digression,  of  divagation, 


iv  DE  QUINCEY  197 


of  aside.  A nd,  worst  of  all,  his  humour,  which  in  its  own  peculiar 
vein  of  imaginative  grotesque  has  seldom  been  surpassed,  was 
liable  constantly  to  degenerate  into  a  kind  of  laboured  trifling, 
inexpressibly  exasperating  to  the  nerves.  He  could  be  simply 
dull ;  and  he  can  seldom  be  credited  with  the  possession  of  what 
may  be  called  literary  tact. 

Yet  his  merits  were  such  as  to  give  him  no  superior  in  his 
own  manner  among  the  essayists,  and  hardly  any  among  the  prose 
writers  of  the  century.  He,  like  Wilson,  and  probably  before 
Wilson,  deliberately  aimed  at  a  style  of  gorgeous  elaboration, 
intended  not  exactly  for  constant  use,  but  for  use  when  required ; 
and  he  achieved  it.  Certain  well-known  passages,  as  well  as 
others  which  have  not  become  hackneyed,  in  the  Confessions  of  an 
Opium  Eater,  in  the  Autobiography,  in  The  English  Mail  Coach, 
in  Our  Ladies  of  Sorrow,  and  elsewhere,  are  unsurpassed  in 
English  or  out  of  it  for  imaginative  splendour  of  imagery, 
suitably  reproduced  in  words.  Nor  was  this  De  Quincey's  only, 
though  it  was  his  most  precious  gift.  He  had  a  singular,  though, 
as  has  been  said,  a  very  untrustworthy  faculty  of  humour,  both 
grim  and  quaint.  He  was  possessed  of  extraordinary  dialectic 
ingenuity,  a  little  alloyed,  no  doubt,  by  a  tendency  to  wire-drawn 
and  over-subtle  minuteness  such  as  besets  the  born  logician  who 
is  not  warned  of  his  danger  either  by  a  strong  vein  of  common- 
sense  or  by  constant  sojourn  in  the  world.  ..He  could  expound 
and  describe  admirably ;  he  had  a  thorough  grasp  of  the  most 
complicated  subjects  when  he  did  not  allow  will-o'-the-wisps  to 
lure  him  into  letting  it  go,  and  could  narrate  the  most  diverse 
kinds  of  action,  such  as  the  struggles  of  Bentley  with  Trinity 
College,  the  journey  of  the  Tartars  from  the  Ukraine  to  Siberia, 
and  the  fortunes  of  the  Spanish  Nun,  Catalina,  with  singular 
adaptability.  In  his  biographical  articles  on  friends  and  contem- 
poraries, which  are  rather  numerous,  he  has  been  charged  both 
with  ill-nature  and  with  inaccuracy.  The  first  charge  may  be  per- 
emptorily dismissed,  the  second  requires  much  argument  and 
sifting  in  particular  cases.  To  some  who  have  given  not  a  little 


198  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

attention  to  the  matter  it  seems  that  De  Quincey  was  never 
guilty  of  deliberate  fabrication,  and  that  he  was  not  even  careless 
in  statement.  But  he  was  first  of  all  a  dreamer ;  and  when  it  is 
true  of  a  man  that,  in  the  words  of  the  exquisite  passage  where 
Calderon  has  come  at  one  with  Shakespeare,  his  very  dreams  are 
a  dream,  it  will  often  happen  that  his  facts  are  not  exactly  a  fact. 

Nevertheless,  De  Quincey  is  a  great  writer  and  a  great  figure 
in  literature,  while  it  may  plausibly  be  contended  that  journalism 
may  make  all  the  more  boast  of  him  in  that  it  is  probable  that 
without  it  he  would  never  have  written  at  all.  And  he  has  one 
peculiarity  not  yet  mentioned.  Although  his  chief  excellences 
may  not  be  fully  perceptible  except  to  mature  tastes,  he  is 
specially  attractive  to  the  young.  Probably  more  boys  have  in 
the  last  forty  years  been  brought  to  a  love  of  literature  proper 
by  De  Quincey  than  by  any  other  writer  whatever. 

Of  other  contributors  to  these  periodicals  much  might  be  said 
in  larger  space,  as  for  instance  of  the  poisoner-critic  Thomas 
Griffiths  Wainewright,  the  "  Janus  Weathercock  "  of  the  London, 
the  original  of  certain  well-known  heroes  of  Bulwer  and  Dickens, 
and  the  object  of  a  more  than  once  recurrent  and  distinctly 
morbid  attention  from  young  men  of  letters  since.  Lamb, 
who  was  not  given  to  think  evil  of  his  friends,  was  certainly 
unlucky  in  calling  Wainewright  "warm-  as  light-hearted";  for  the 
man  (who  died  a  convict  in  Australia,  though  he  cheated  the 
gallows  which  was  his  due)  was  both  an  affected  coxcomb  and  a 
callous  scoundrel.  But  he  was  a  very  clever  fellow,  though  indig- 
nant morality  has  sometimes  endeavoured  to  deny  this.  That  he 
anticipated  by  sixty  years  and  more  certain  depravations  in  style 
and  taste  notorious  in  our  own  day  is  something  :  it  is  more  that 
his  achievement  in  gaudy  writing  and  in  the  literary  treatment  of 
art  was  really  considerable. 

Wainewright,  however,  is  only  "  curious  "  in  more  than  one 
sense  of  that  term  :  Leigh  Hunt,  who,  though  quite  incapable  of 
poisoning  anybody,  had  certain  points  in  common  with  Waine- 
wright on  the  latter's  more  excusable  sides,  and  whose  prose  must 


LEIGH  HUNT  199 


now  be  treated,  is  distinguished.  He  reappears  with  even  better 
right  here  than  some  others  of  the  more  important  constituents  of 
this  chapter.  For  all  his  best  work  in  prose  appeared  in 
periodicals,  though  it  is  impossible  to  say  that  all  his  work  that 
appeared  in  periodicals  was  his  best  work.  He  was  for  fourteen 
years  editor  of,  and  a  large  contributor  to,  the  Examiner,  which  he 
and  his  brother  started  in  1808.  Besides  his  contributions  to  this, 
he  not  merely  edited,  but  in  the  older  fashion  practically  wrote  the 
Reflector  (1810),  the  Indicator  (1819-21),  and  the  Companion 
(1828).  His  rather  unlucky  journey  to  Italy  was  undertaken  to 
edit  the  Liberal.  He  was  one  of  the  rare  and  rash  men  of  letters 
who  have  tried  to  keep  up  a  daily  journal  unassisted — a  new  Taller, 
which  lasted  for  some  eighteen  months  (1830-32);  and  a  little 
later  (1834-35)  he  supported  for  full  two  years  a  similar  but 
weekly  venture,  in  part  original,  in  part  compiled  or  borrowed, 
called  Leigh  Hunfs  London  Journal.  These  were  not  his  only 
ventures  of  the  kind :  he  was  an  indefatigable  contributor  to 
periodicals  conducted  by  others ;  and  most  of  his  books  now 
known  by  independent  titles  are  in  fact  collections  of  "  articles  " 
• — sometimes  reprinted,  sometimes  published  for  the  first  time. 

It  was  impossible  that  such  a  mass  of  matter  should  be  all 
good ;  and  it  is  equally  impossible  to  deny  that  the  combined 
fact  of  so  much  production  and  of  so  little  concentration  argues 
a  certain  idiosyncrasy  of  defect.  In  fact  the  butterfly  character 
which  every  unprejudiced  critic  of  Leigh  Hunt  has  noticed,  made 
it  impossible  for  him  to  plan  or  to  execute  any  work  on  a  great 
scale.  He  never  could  have  troubled  himself  to  complete  missing 
knowledge,  to  fill  in  gaps,  to  co-ordinate  thinking,  as  the  literary 
historian,  whose  vocation  in  some  respects  he  might  seem  to 
have  possessed  eminently,  must  do — to  weave  fancy  into  the 
novelist's  solid  texture,  and  not  to  leave  it  in  thrums  or  in  gossamer. 
But  he  was,  though  in  both  ways  a  most  unequal,  a  delightful 
miscellanist  and  critic.  In  both  respects  it  is  natural,  and  indeed 
unavoidable,  to  compare  him  with  Lamb  and  with  Hazlitt,  whom, 
however,  he  really  preceded,  forming  a  link  between  them  and  the 


THE  DEVKLOPiMKNT  OF  PERIODICALS 


eighteenth  century  essayists.  His  greater  voluminousness,  in- 
duced by  necessity,  puts  him  at  a  rather  unfair  disadvantage 
with  the  first ;  and  we  may  perhaps  never  find  in  him  those 
exquisite  felicities  which  delight  and  justify  the  true  "Agnist." 
Yet  he  has  found  some  things  that  Lamb  missed  in  Lamb's  own 
subjects ;  and  though  his  prejudices  (of  the  middle-class  liberal 
and  freethinking  kind)  were  sometimes  more  damaging  than  any 
to  which  Lamb  was  exposed,  he  was  free  from  the  somewhat 
wilful  eclecticism  of  that  inimitable  person.  He  could  like  nearly 
all  things  that  were  good — in  which  respect  he  stands  above  both 
his  rivals  in  criticism.  But  he  stands  below  them  in  his  miscel- 
laneous work  ;  though  here  also,  as  in  his  poetry,  he  was  a  master, 
not  a  scholar.  Lamb  and  Ha/.litt  improved  upon  him  here,  as 
Keats  and  Shelley  improved  upon  him  there.  But  what  a  position 
is  it  to  be  "  improved  upon  "  by  Keats  and  Shelley  in  poetry,  by 
Hazlitt  and  Lamb  in  prose  ! 

Hartley  Coleridge  might  with  about  equal  propriety  have  been 
treated  in  the  last  chapter  and  in  this  ;  but  the  already  formidable 
length  of  the  catalogue  of  bards  perhaps  turns  the  scale  in  favour 
of  placing  him  with  other  contributors  to  Blackwond,  to  which, 
thanks  to  his  early  friendship  with  Wilson,  he  enjoyed  access, 
and  in  which  he  might  have  written  much  more  than  he  did, 
and  did  actually  write  most  of  what  he  published  himself,  except 
the  Biographia  Borealis. 

The  life  of  Hartley  was  a  strange  and  sad  variant  of  his 
father's,  though,  if  he  lacked  a  good  deal  of  S.  T.  C.'s  genius,  his 
character  was  entirely  free  from  the  baser  stains  which  darkened 
that  great  man's  weakness.  Born  (i  796)  at  Clevedon,  the  first-fruits 
of  the  marriage  of  Coleridge  and  Sara,  he  was  early  celebrated  by 
Wordsworth  and  by  his  father  in  immortal  verse,  and  by  Southey, 
his  uncle,  in  charming  prose,  for  his  wonderful  dreamy  precocity; 
but  he  never  was  a  great  reader.  Southey  took  care  of  him  with 
the  rest  of  the  family  when  Coleridge  disappeared  into  the  vague ; 
and  Hartley,  after  schooling  at  Ambleside,  was  elected  to  a  post- 
mastership  at  Merton  College,  Oxford.  He  missed  the  Newdi- 


iv  HARTLEY  COLERIDGE 


gate  thrice,  and  only  got  a  second  in  the  schools,  but  was  more 
than  consoled  by  a  Fellowship  at  Oriel.  Unfortunately  Oriel  was 
not  only  gaining  great  honour,  but  was  very  jealous  of  it ;  and  the 
probationary  Fellows  were  subjected  to  a  most  rigid  system  of 
observation,  which  seems  to  have  gone  near  to  espionage.  If 
ever  there  was  a  man  born  to  be  a  Fellow  under  the  old  English 
University  scheme,  that  man  was  Hartley  Coleridge ;  and  it  is 
extremely  probable  that -if  he  had  been  let  alone  he  would  have 
produced,  in  one  form  or  another,  a  justification  of  that  scheme, 
worthy  to  rank  with  Burton's  Anatomy.  But  he  was  accused 
of  various  shortcomings,  of  which  intemperance  seems  to  have 
been  the  most  serious,  though  it  is  doubtful  whether  it  would 
have  sunk  the  beam  if  divers  peccadillos,  political,  social,  and 
miscellaneous,  had  not  been  thrown  in.  Strong  interest  was  made 
in  favour  of  mercy,  but  the  College  deprived  him  of  his  Fellow- 
ship, granting  him,  not  too  consistently,  a  solatium  of  ^300.  This 
was  apparently  in  1820.  Hartley  lived  for  nearly  thirty  years 
longer,  but  his  career  was  closed.  He  was,  as  his  brother 
Derwent  admits,  one  of  those  whom  the  pressure  of  necessity 
does  not  spur  but  numbs.  He  wrote  a  little  for  Blackwood ;  he 
took  pupils  unsuccessfully,  and  school-mastered  with  a  little  better 
success ;  and  during  a  short  time  he  lived  with  a  Leeds  publisher, 
who  took  a  fancy  to  him  and  induced  him  to  write  his  only  large 
book,  the  Biographia  Borealis.  But  for  the  most  part  he  abode 
at  Grasmere,  where  his  failing  (it  was  not  much  more)  of  occa- 
sional intemperance  was  winked  at  by  all,  even  by  the  austere 
Wordsworth,  where  he  wandered  about,  annotated  a  copy  of 
Anderson's  Poets  and  some  other  books,  and  supported  himself 
(with  the  curious  Coleridgean  faculty  of  subsisting  like  the  bird 
of  paradise,  without  either  foot  or  foothold)  till,  at  his  mother's 
death,  an  annuity  made  his  prospects  secure.  He  died  on  6th 
January  1849,  a  little  before  Wordsworth,  and  shortly  afterwards 
his  work  was  collected  by  his  brother  Derwent  in  seven  small 
volumes, — the  Poems  filling  two,  the  Essays  and  Fragments  two 
and  the  Biographia  Borealis  three. 


202  THE  DKVKLOPMKNT  OV  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

This  last  (which  appeared  in  its  second  form  as  Lives  oj 
Northern  Worthies,  with  some  extremely  interesting  notes  by 
S.  T.  C.)  is  an  excellent  book  of  its  kind,  and  shows  that  under 
more  favourable  circumstances  Hartley  might  have  been  a  great 
literary  historian.  But  it  is  on  the  whole  less  characteristic  than 
the  volumes  of  Poems  and  Essays.  In  the  former  Hartley  has 
no  kind  of  souffle  (or  long-breathed  inspiration),  nor  has  he  these 
exquisite  lyrical  touches  of  his  father's  which  put  Coleridge's  scanty 
and  unequal  work  on  a  level  with  that  of  the  greatest  names  in 
English  poetry.  But  he  has  a  singular  melancholy  sweetness,  and 
a  meditative  grace  which  finds  its  special  home  in  the  sonnet. 
In  the  "Posthumous  Sonnets"  especially,  the  sound — not  an 
echo  of,  but  a  true  response  to,  Elizabethan  music — is  unmis- 
takable, and  that  to  Shakespeare  ("  The  soul  of  man  is  larger  than 
the  sky"),  that  on  himself  ("When  I  survey  the  course  that  I  have 
run  "),  and  not  a  few  others,  rank  among  the  very  best  in  English. 
Many  of  the  miscellaneous  poems  contain  beautiful  things.  But 
on  the  whole  the  greatest  interest  of  Hartley  Coleridge  is  that  he 
is  one  of  the  first  and  best  examples  of  a  kind  of  poet  who  is 
sometimes  contemned,  who  has  been  very  frequent  in  this  cen- 
tury, but  who  is  dear  to  the  lover  of  poetry,  and  productive  of 
delightful  things.  This  kind  of  poet  is  wanting,  it  may  be,  in 
what  is  briefly,  if  not  brutally,  called  originality.  He  might  not 
sing  much  if  others  had  not  sung  and  were  not  singing  around 
him  ;  he  does  not  sing  very  much  even  as  it  is,  and  the  notes  of  his 
song  are  not  extraordinarily  piercing  or  novel.  But  they  are  true, 
they  are  not  copied,  and  the  lover  of  poetry  could  not  spare  them. 

It  is  improbable  that  Hartley  Coleridge  would  ever  have  been 
a  great  poet :  he  might,  if  Fate  or  even  if  the  Oriel  dons  had  been 
a  little  kinder,  have  been  a  great  critic.  As  it  is,  his  essays,  his  • 
introduction  to  Massinger  and  Ford,  and  his  Marginalia,  suffer 
on  the  one  side  from  certain  defects  of  reading ;  for  his  access  to 
books  was  latterly  small,  and  even  when  it  had  been  ample,  as  at 
Oxford,  in  London,  or  at  Smithey's  house,  he  confesses  that  he 
had  availed  himself  of  it  but  little.  Hence  he  is  often  wrong,  and 


iv  MAGINN  203 


more  often  incomplete,  from  sheer  lack  of  information.  Secondly, 
much  of  his  work  is  mere  jotting,  never  in  the  very  least  degree 
intended  for  publication,  and  sometimes  explicitly  corrected  or 
retracted  by  later  jottings  of  the  same  kind.  In  such  a  case  we 
can  rather  augur  of  the  might-have-been  than  pronounce  on  the 
actual.  But  the  two  volumes  are  full  of  delicate  critical  views 
on  literature ;  and  the  longest  series,  "  Ignoramus  on  the  Fine 
Arts,"  shows  how  widely,  with  better  luck  and  more  opportunity, 
he  might  have  extended  his  critical  performances.  In  short, 
Hartley  Coleridge,  if  a  "sair  sicht"  to  the  moralist,  is  an  interest- 
ing and  far  from  a  wholly  painful  one  to  the  lover  of  literature, 
which  he  himself  loved  so  much,  and  practised,  with  all  his 
disadvantages,  so  successfully. 

All  the  persons  hitherto  mentioned  in  this  chapter  appear  by 
undoubted  right  in  any  history  of  English  Literature  :  it  may 
cause  a  little  surprise  to  see  that  of  Maginn  figuring  with  them. 
Yet  his  abilities  were  scarcely  inferior  to  those  of  any  ;  and  he 
was  kept  back  from  sharing  their  fame  only  by  infirmities  of 
character  and  by  his  succumbing  to  that  fatal  Bohemianism  which, 
constantly  recurring  among  men  of  letters,  exercised  its  attrac- 
tions with  special  force  in  the  early  days  of  journalism  in  this 
century.  William  Maginn  (i  793),  who  was  the  son  of  a  schoolmaster 
at  Cork,  took  a  brilliant  degree  at  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  and  for 
some  years  followed  his  father's  profession.  The  establishment, 
however,  and  the  style  of  Blackivood  were  an  irresistible  attraction 
to  him,  and  he  drifted  to  Edinburgh,  wrote  a  great  deal  in  the 
earlier  and  more  boisterous  days  of  Maga  under  the  pseudonym 
of  Ensign  O'Doherty,  and  has,  as  has  been  said,  some  claims  to  be 
considered  the  originator  of  the  Nodes.  Then,  as  he  had  gone  from 
Ireland  to  Edinburgh,  he  went  from  Edinburgh  to  London,  and 
took  part  in  divers  Tory  periodicals,  acting  as  Paris  correspondent 
for  some  of  them  till,  about  1830,  he  started,  or  helped  to  start, 
a  London  Blackwood  in  Eraser.  He  had  now  every  opportunity, 
and  he  gathered  round  him  a  staff  almost  more  brilliant  than  that 
of  the  Edinburgh^  of  the  London,  of  the  Qitaritrly,  or  of  Blaik- 


2o4  TIIK  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 


wood  itself.  But  he  was  equally  reckless  of  his  health  and  of  his 
money.  The  acknowledged  original  of  Thackeray's  Captain 
Shandon,  he  was  not  seldom  in  jail ;  and  at  last,  assisted  by  Sir 
Robert  Peel  almost  too  late,  he  died  at  Walton  on  Thames  in 
August  1842,  not  yet  fifty,  but  an  utter  wreck. 

The  collections  of  Maginn's  work  are  anything  but  exhaustive, 
and  the  work  itself  suffers  from  all  the  drawbacks,  probable  if  not 
inevitable,  of  work  written  in  the  intervals  of  carouse,  at  the  last 
moment,  for  ephemeral  purposes.  Yet  it  is  instinct  with  a  perhaps 
brighter  genius  than  the  more  accomplished  productions  of  some 
much  more  famous  men.  The  Homeric  Ballads,  though  they 
have  been  praised  by  some,  are  nearly  worthless ;  and  the  longer 
attempts  in  fiction  are  not  happy.  But  Maginn's  shorter  stories 
in  Blackivood,  especially  the  inimitable  "Story  without  a  Tail," 
are  charming ;  his  more  serious  critical  work,  especially  that  on 
Shakespeare,  displays  a  remarkable  combination  of  wide  reading, 
critical  acumen,  and  sound  sense;  and  his  miscellanies,  like  those 
of  his  contributor  Father  Prout,  are  characterised  by  a  mixture 
of  fantastic  humour,  adaptive  wit,  and  rare  but  real  pathos  and 
melody,  which  is  the  best  note  of  the  specially  Irish  mode.  It 
must  be  said,  however,  that  Maginn  is  chiefly  important  to  the 
literary  historian  as  the  captain  of  a  band  of  distinguished  persons, 
and  as  in  a  way  the  link  between  the  journalism  of  the  first  and 
the  journalism  of  the  second  third  of  the  century.  A  famous 
plate  by  Maclise,  entitled  "The  Fraserians,"  contains,  seated 
round  abundant  bottles,  with  Maginn  as  president,  portraits  (in 
order  by  "the  way  of  the  sun,"  and  omitting  minor  personages)  of 
Irving,  Mahony  (Father  Prout),  Gleig,  Sir  Egerton  Brydges,  Allan 
Cunningham,  Carlyle,  Count  D'Orsay,  Brewstcr,  Theodore  Hook, 
Lockhart,  Crofton  Croker  of  the  Irish  Fairy  Tales,  Jerdan,  Dunlop 
of  the  "History  of  Fiction,"  Gait,  Hogg,  Coleridge,  Harrison 
Ainsworth,  Thackeray,  Southey,  and  Barry  Cornwall.  It  is  improb- 
able that  all  these  contributed  at  one  time,  and  tolerably  certain 
that  some  of  them  were  very  sparing  and  infrequent  contributors 
at  any  time,  but  the  important  point  is  the  juxtaposition  of  the 


iv  THE  FRASERIANS— STERLING  205 

generation  which  was  departing  and  the  generation  which  was  com- 
ing on — of  Southey  with  Thackeray  and  of  Coleridge  with  Carlyle. 
Yet  it  will  be  noticed  (and  the  point  is  of  some  importance)  that 
these  new-comers  are,  at  least  the  best  of  them,  much  less  merely 
periodical  writers  than  those  who  came  immediately  before  them. 
In  part,  no  doubt,  this  was  accident ;  in  part  it  was  due  to  the 
greater  prominence  which  novels  and  serial  works  of  other  kinds 
were  beginning  to  assume  ;  in  part  it  may  be  to  the  fact  that  the 
great  increase  in  the  number  of  magazines  and  newspapers  had 
lowered  their  individual  dignity  and  perhaps  their  profitableness. 
But  it  is  certain  that  of  the  list  just  mentioned  Thackeray  and 
Carlyle,  of  the  contemporary  new  generation  of  the  Edinburgh 
Macaulay,  of  the  nascent  Westminster  Mill,  and  others,  were  not, 
like  Jeffrey,  like  Sydney  Smith,  like  Wilson,  and  like  De  Quincey, 
content  to  write  articles.  They  aspired  to  write,  and  they  did 
write,  books ;  and,  that  being  so,  they  will  all  be  treated  in 
chapters  other  than  the  present,  appropriated  to  the  kinds  in 
which  their  chief  books  were  designed. 

The  name  of  John  Sterling  is  that  of  a  man  who,  with  no 
great  literary  claims  of  his  own,  managed  to  connect  it  durably 
and  in  a  double  fashion  with  literature,  first  as  the  subject  of  an 
immortal  biography  by  Carlyle,  secondly  as  the  name-giver  of  the 
famous  Sterling  Club,  which  about  1838,  and  hardly  numbering 
more  members  than  the  century  did  years,  included  a  surpris- 
ing proportion  of  the  most  rising  men  of  letters  of  the  day, 
while  all  but  a  very  few  of  its  members  were  of  literary  mark. 
John  Sterling  himself  was  the  son  of  a  rather  eccentric  father, 
Edward  Sterling,  who,  after  trying  soldiering  with  no  great,  and 
farming  with  decidedly  ill,  success,  turned  to  journalism  and 
succeeded  brilliantly  on  the  Times.  His  son  was  born  in  the  Isle 
of  Bute  on  2oth  July  1806,  was  educated,  first  privately,  then  at 
Glasgow,  and  when  about  nineteen  went  to  Trinity  College,  Cam- 
bridge, where  he  fell  in  with  a  famous  and  brilliant  set.  He 
migrated  from  Trinity  College  to  Trinity  Hall,  took  no  degree, 
wrote  a  little  for  the  then  young  Athemeum,  was  engaged  in  a 


206  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 


romantic  and  in  all  ways  rather  unfortunate  business  of  encourag- 
ing a  rebellion  in  Spain,  but  married  instead  of  taking  active  part 
in  it,  and  went  to  the  West  Indies.  When  he  came  home  he,  it  is 
said  under  Coleridgean  influence,  took  orders,  but  soon  de- 
veloped heterodox  views  and  gave  up  active  duty.  He  lived, 
though  under  sentence  of  death  by  consumption,  till  1843,  spend- 
ing much  time  abroad,  but  writing  a  little,  chiefly  for  periodicals. 

The  chief  characteristic  of  Sterling  in  life  and  thought  appears 
to  have  been  a  vacillating  impulsiveness,  while  in  letters  his  pro- 
duction, small  in  bulk,  is  anything  but  strong  in  substance  or 
form.  But,  like  some  other  men  who  do  not,  in  the  common 
phrase,  "  do  much,"  he  seems  to  have  been  singularly  effectual  as 
a  centre  of  literary  friendship  and  following.  The  Sterling  Club 
included  not  merely  Tennyson,  John  Stuart  Mill,  Carlyle,  Allan 
Cunningham,  Lord  Houghton,  Sir  Francis  Palgrave,  Bishop 
Thirlwall,  who  all  receive  separate  notice  elsewhere,  but  others 
who,  being  of  less  general  fame,  may  best  be  noticed  together 
here.  There  were  the  scholars  Blakesley,  Worsley,  and  Hepworth 
Thompson  (afterwards  Master  of  Trinity) ;  H.  N.  Coleridge,  the 
poet's  nephew,  son-in-law,  and  editor ;  Sir  Francis  Doyle,  after- 
wards Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford,  the  author  of  some  interest- 
ing reminiscences  in  prose,  and  in  verse  of  some  of  the  best  songs 
and  poems  on  military  subjects  to  be  found  in  the  language,  such 
as  "  The  Loss  of  the  Birkenhead,"  the  "  Private  of  the  Buffs," 
and  above  all  the  noble  and  consummate  "  Red  Thread  of 
Honour "  ;  Sir  Edmund  Head,  Fellow  of  Merton  and  Governor- 
General  of  Canada,  and  a  writer  on  art  (not  to  be  cqnfounded 
with  his  namesake  Sir  Francis,  the  agreeable  miscellanist,  reviewer, 
and  travel  writer,  who  was  also  a  baronet  and  also  connected  with 
Canada,  where  he  was  Governor  of  the  Upper  Province  in  the 
troublesome  times  of  the  thirties).  There  was  Sir  George  Cornewall 
Lewis,  a  keen  scholar  and  a  fastidious  writer,  whose  somewhat 
short  life  (1806-63)  was  chiefly  occupied  by  politics  ;  for  he  was 
a  Poor-Law  Commissioner,  a  Member  of  Parliament,  and  a  holder 
of  numerous  offices  up  to  those  of  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer 


iv  THE  STERLING  CLUB  207 

and  Secretary  of  State.  Lewis,  who  edited  the  Edinburgh  for  a 
short  time,  wrote  no  very  long  work,  but  many  on  a  great  variety 
of  subjects,  the  chief  perhaps  being  On  the  Influence  of  Authority 
in  Matters  of  Opinion,  1850  (a  book  interesting  to  contrast  with 
one  by  a  living  statesman  forty-five  years  later),  the  Inquiry  into 
the  Credibility  of  the  Ancient  Roman  History  (1855),  and  later 
treatises  on  The  Government  of  Dependencies  and  the  Best  Form 
of  Government.  He  was  also  an  exact  verbal  scholar,  was,  despite 
the  addiction  to  "  dry "  subjects  which  this  list  may  seem  to 
show,  the  author  of  not  a  few  jeux  d°  esprit,  and  was  famous  for  his 
conversational  sayings,  the  most  hackneyed  of  which  is  probably 
"  Life  would  be  tolerable  if  it  were  not  for  its  amusements." 

But  even  this  did  not  exhaust  the  Sterling  Club.  There  was 
another  scholar,  Maiden,  who  should  have  been  mentioned  with 
the  group  above ;  the  second  Sir  Frederick  Pollock,  who  wrote 
too  little,  but  left  an  excellent  translation  of  Dante,  besides  some 
reminiscences  and  other  work ;  Philip  Pusey,  elder  brother 
of  the  theologian,  and  a  man  of  remarkable  ability ;  James 
Spedding,  who  devoted  almost  the  whole  of  his  literary  life  to  the 
study,  championship,  and  editing  of  Bacon,  but  left  other  essays 
and  reviews  of  great  merit;  Twisleton,  who  undertook  with 
singular  patience  and  shrewdness  the  solution  of  literary  and 
historical  problems  like  the  Junius  question  and  that  of  the 
African  martyrs  ;  and,  lastly,  George  Stovin  Venables,  who  for 
some  five-and-thirty  years  was  the  main  pillar  in  political  writing 
of  the  Saturday  Review,  was  a  parliamentary  lawyer  of  great 
diligence  and  success,  and  combined  a  singularly  exact  and  wide 
knowledge  of  books  and  men  in  politics  and  literature  with  a  keen 
judgment,  an  admirably  forcible  if  somewhat  mannered  style,  a 
disposition  far  more  kindly  than  the  world  was  apt  to  credit  him 
with,  and  a  famous  power  of  conversation.  All  these  men,  almost 
without  exception,  were  more  or  less  contributors  to  periodicals  ; 
and  it  may  certainly  be  said  that,  but  for  periodicals,  it  is  rather  un- 
likely that  some  of  them  would  have  contributed  to  literature  at  all. 

Not  as  a  member  of  the  Sterling  Club,  but  as  the  intimate 


208  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS  CHAP. 

friend  of  all  its  greatest  members,  as  a  contributor,  though  a 
rather  unfrequent  one,  to  papers,  and  as  a  writer  of  singular  and 
extraordinary  quality  but  difficult  to  class  under  a  more  precise 
head,  may  be  noticed  Edward  FitzGerald,  who,  long  a  recluse, 
unstintedly  admired  by  his  friends,  but  quite  unknown  to  the 
public,  became  famous  late  in  life  by  his  translation  of  Omar 
Khayyam,  and  familiar  somewhat  after  his  death  through  the 
publication  of  his  charming  letters  by  Mr.  Aldis  Wright.  He  was 
born  on  3151  March  1809,  near  Woodbridge  in  Suffolk,  the  neigh- 
bourhood which  was  his  headquarters  for  almost  his  entire  life, 
till  his  death  on  a  visit  to  a  grandson  of  the  poet  Crabbe  at 
Merton  in  Norfolk,  i4th  June  1883.  He  went  to  school  at  Bury, 
and  thence  to  Cambridge,  where  he  laid  the  foundation  of  his 
acquaintance  with  the  famous  Trinity  set  of  1825-30.  But  on 
taking  his  degree  in  the  last-named  year  and  leaving  college,  he 
adopted  no  profession,  but  entered  on  the  life  of  reading,  thinking, 
gardening,  and  boating,  which  he  pursued  for  more  than  half  a 
century.  Besides  his  Trinity  contemporaries,  from  Tennyson  and 
Thackeray  downwards,  he  had  Carlyle  for  an  intimate  friend,  and 
he  married  the  daughter  of  Bernard  Barton,  the  poet  Quaker  and 
friend  of  Lamb.  He  published  nothing  till  the  second  half  of  the 
century  had  opened,  when  Euphranor,  written  long  before  at 
Cambridge,  or  with  reference  to  it,  appeared.  Then  he  learnt 
Spanish,  and  first  showed  his  extraordinary  faculty  of  translation  by 
Englishing  divers  dramas  of  Calderon.  Spanish  gave  way  to  Persian 
and  after  some  exercises  elsewhere  the  famous  version,  paraphrase, 
or  whatever  it  is  to  be  called,  of  the  Rubaiyat  of  Omar  Khayyam 
appeared  in  1859,  to  be  much  altered  in  subsequent  editions. 

FitzGerald's  works  in  the  collected  edition  of  1889  fill  three 
pretty  stout  volumes,  to  which  a  considerable  number  of  letters  (he 
was  first  of  all  and  almost  solely  a  letter-writer  and  translator) 
have  been  added.  In  his  prose  (no  disrespect  being  intended  to 
Euphranor,  a  dialogue  Berkeleian  in  form  and  of  great  beauty, 
and  other  things)  he  interests  us  doubly  as  a  character  and  as  a 
critic,  for  the  letters  contain  much  criticism.  Personally  Fitz- 


iv  EDWARD  FITZGERALD  209 

Gerald  was  a  man  of  rather  few  and  not  obtrusive,  but  deep  and 
warm  sympathies,  slow  to  make  new  friends,  but  intensely  tenacious 
of  and  affectionate  towards  the  old,  with  a  very  strong  distaste 
for  crowds  and  general  society,  and  undoubtedly  somewhat  of  what 
the  French  call  a  maniaque,  that  is  to  say,  a  slightly  hypochondriac 
crotcheteer.  These  characteristics,  which  make  him  interesting 
as  a  man,  are  still  more  interestingly  reflected  in  his  criticism, 
which  is  often  one-sided  and  unjust,  sometimes  crotchetty  (as  when 
he  would  not  admit  that  even  his  beloved  Alfred  Tennyson  had 
ever  been  at  his  best  since  the  collection  of  1842),  but  often  also 
wonderfully  delicate  and  true. 

As  a  translator  he  stands  almost  alone,  his  peculiar  virtue, 
noticeable  alike  in  his  versions  from  the  Spanish  and  Greek,  being 
so  capitally  and  once  for  all  illustrated  in  that  of  Omar  Khayyam, 
that  in  narrow  space  it  is  not  necessary  to  go  beyond  this.  From 
the  purist  and  pedantic  point  of  view  FitzGerald,  no  doubt,  is 
wildly  unfaithful.  He  scarcely  ever  renders  word  for  word,  and 
will  insert,  omit,  alter,  with  perfect  freedom ;  yet  the  total  effect  is 
reproduced  as  perhaps  no  other  translator  has  ever  reproduced  it. 
Whether  his  version  of  the  Rubaiyat,  with  its  sensuous  fatalism,  its 
ridicule  of  asceticism  and  renunciation,  and  its  bewildering 
kaleidoscope  of  mysticism  that  becomes  materialist  and  material- 
ism that  becomes  mystical,  has  not  indirectly  had  influences, 
practical  and  literary,  the  results  of  which  would  have  been  more 
abhorrent  to  FitzGerald  than  to  almost  any  one  else,  may  be 
suggested.  But  the  beauty  of  the  poem  as  a  poem  is  unmistak- 
able and  altogether  astounding.  The  melancholy  richness  of  the 
rolling  quatrain  with  its  unicorn  rhymes,  the  quaint  mixture  of 
farce  and  solemnity,  passion  and  playfulness,  the  abundance  of  the 
imagery,  the  power  of  the  thought,  the  seduction  of  the  rhetoric, 
make  the  poem  actually,  though  not  original  or  English,  one  of 
the  greatest  of  English  poems. 

Of  the  periodical  too,  if  not  entirely,  was  Richard  Harris 
Barham,  "Thomas  Ingoldsby,"  the  author  of  the  most  popular 
book  of  light  verse  that  ever  issued  from  the  press.  His  one 

P 


210  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  PERIODICALS         CHAP,  iv 

novel,  My  Cousin  Nicholas,  was  written  for  Blackwood ;  the 
immortal  Ingoldsby  Legends  appeared  in  Bentley  and  Colburn. 
Born  at  Canterbury  in  1788,  of  a  family  possessed  of  landed 
property,  though  not  of  much,  and  educated  at  St.  Paul's  School 
and  Brasenose  College,  Barham  took  orders,  and,  working  with 
thorough  conscience  as  a  clergyman,  despite  his  light  literature, 
became  a  minor  canon  in  St.  Paul's  Cathedral.  He  died  in  1845. 
Hardly  any  book  is  more  widely  known  than  the  collected 
Ingoldsby  Legends,  which  originally  appeared  in  the  last  eight  years 
of  their  author's  life.  Very  recently  they  have  met  with  a  little 
priggish  depreciation,  the  natural  and  indeed  inevitable  result,  first 
of  a  certain  change  in  speech  and  manners,  and  then  of  their  long 
and  vast  popularity.  Nor  would  any  one  contend  that  they  are 
exactly  great  literature.  But  for  inexhaustible  fun  that  never  gets 
flat  and  scarcely  ever  simply  uproarious,  for  a  facility  and  felicity 
in  rhyme  and  rhythm  which  is  almost  miraculous,  and  for  a 
blending  of  the  grotesque  and  the  terrible  which,  if  less  fine  than 
Praed's  or  Hood's,  is  only  inferior  to  theirs — no  one  competent 
to  judge  and  enjoy  will  ever  go  to  Barham  in  vain. 

The  same  difficulty  which  beset  us  at  the  end  of  the  last 
chapter  recurs  here,  the  difficulty  arising  from  the  existence  of 
large  numbers  of  persons  of  the  third  or  lower  ranks  whose 
inclusion  may  be  desired  or  their  exclusion  resented.  At  the  head, 
or  near  it,  of  this  class  stand  such  figures  as  that  of  Douglas 
Jerrold,  a  sort  of  very  inferior  Hook  on  the  other  side  of  politics, 
with  a  dash  (also  very  inferior)  of  Hood,  whose  Mrs.  Caudle  s 
Curtain  Lectures  and  similar  things  were  very  popular  at  and  a 
little  before  the  middle  of  the  century,  but  whose  permanent 
literary  value  is  of  the  smallest,  if  indeed  it  can  be  said  to  exist. 
But  of  these — not  a  few  of  them  more  worthy  if  less  prominent 
in  their  day  than  Jerrold — there  could  be  no  end  ;  and  there 
would  be  little  profit  in  trying  to  reach  any.  The  successful  ''con- 
tributor.'1 by  the  laws  of  the  case,  climbs  on  the  shoulders  of  his  less 
successful  mates  even  more  than  elsewhere  ;  and  the  very  impetus 
which  lands  him  on  the  height  rejects  them  into  the  depths. 


CHAPTER   V 

THE    HISTORIANS    OF    THE    CENTURY 

AFTER  the  brilliant  group  of  historians  whose  work  illustrated  the 
close  of  the  period  covered  by  the  preceding  volume,  it  was 
some  time  before  a  historical  writer  of  the  first  rank  again  appeared 
in  England ;  and  there  were  reasons  for  this.  Not  that,  as  in  the 
case  of  purely  creative  literature,  in  prose  as  in  verse,  there  is 
any  natural  or  actual  lull  between  different  successive  periods  in 
this  case  ;  on  the  contrary  the  writing  of  history  is  more  likely  to 
be  stimulated  by  example,  and  requires  rather  the  utmost  talent 
than  positive  genius,  except  in  those  rare  cases  which,  as  in  other 
departments,  are  not  to  be  accounted  for,  either  in  their  presence  or 
in  their  absence,  by  observation  or  inference.  But  in  the  first  place, 
the  greatest  minds  of  the  first  generation  of  which  we  have  to 
take  account,  who  were  born  about  the  beginning  of  the  third 
quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century,  were,  partly  by  time  and  partly 
by  chance,  directed  for  the  most  part  either  into  poetry,  or  into 
politics,  or  into  active  life ;  and  the  five-and-twenty  years  of  the 
Revolutionary  War  in  which  they  passed  their  manhood  were 
more  likely  to  provide  materials  for  history  than  history  itself. 

Yet  history,  after  the  example  given  by  Hume,  by  Robertson, 
and  above  all  by  Gibbon,  was  not  at  all  likely  to  cease,  nor  did 
some  men  of  great  talents  in  other  ways  fail  to  betake  themselves 
to  it.  Godwin  was  a  historian,  and,  considering  his  stronc; 

'  '  o  o 

prejudices,  the  unkindness  of  fortune  (for  history  demands  leisure 
almost  as  much  as  poetry),  and  some  defects  of  knowledge,  not  a 


212  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

contemptible  historian  in  his  way.  Mackintosh,  intended  for  a 
philosopher,  was  a  historian.  Southey  was  a  very  considerable 
historian,  and  master  of  one  of  the  most  admirable  historical  styles 
on  record.  But  he  was  signally  unfortunate  in  having  that  work 
of  his  which  should  have  been  most  popular,  the  History  of  the 
Peninsular  War,  pitted  against  another  by  a  younger  man  of 
professional  competence,  of  actual  experience,  and  of  brilliant 
literary  powers,  Sir  William  Napier  (1786-1860).  The  literary 
value  of  these  two  histories  is  more  even  than  a  generation 
which  probably  reads  neither  much  and  has  almost  forgotten 
Southey  is  apt  to  imagine ;  and  though  there  is  no  doubt  that 
the  Poet  Laureate  was  strongly  prejudiced  on  the  Tory  side, 
his  competitor  was  even  more  partial  and  biassed  against  that 
side.  But  the  difference  between  the  two  books  is  the  difference 
between  a  task  admirably  performed,  and  performed  to  a  certain 
extent  con  amore,  by  a  skilled  practitioner  in  task-work,  and  the 
special  effort  of  one  who  was  at  once  an  enthusiast  and  an 
expert  in  his  subject.  It  is  customary  to  call  Napier's  History  of 
the  Peninsular  War  "the  finest  military  history  in  the  English 
language,"  and  so  perhaps  it  is.  The  famous  description  of  the 
Battle  of  Albuera  is  only  one  of  many  showing  eloquence  without 
any  mere  fine  writing,  and  with  the  knowledge  of  the  soldier 
covering  the  artist's  exaggeration. 

Moore,  Campbell,  Scott  himself,  were  all,  as  lias  been  pre- 
viously recorded  in  the  notices  of  their  proper  work,  historians  by 
trade,  though  hardly,  even  to  the  extent  to  which  Southey  was, 
historians  by  craft.  Yet  an  exception  must  be  made  for  the  exquisite 
Tales  of  a  Grandfather,  in  which  Sir  Walter,  without  perhaps  a 
very  strict  application  of  historical  criticism,  applied  his  creative 
powers,  refreshed  in  their  decay  by  combined  affection  for  the 
subject  and  for  the  presumed  auditor,  to  fashioning  the  traditional 
history  of  old  Scotland  into  one  of  the  most  delightful  narratives 
of  any  language  or  time.  But  Henry  Hallam,  a  contemporary 
of  these  men  (1778-1859),  unlike  them  lives  as  a  historian  only, 
or  as  a  historian  and  literary  critic — occupations  so  frequently  com- 


v  HALLAM  213 

bined  during  the  present  century  that  perhaps  an  apology  is  due 
for  the  presentation  of  some  writers  under  the  general  head  of 
one  class  rather  than  under  that  of  the  other.  Hallam,  the  son  of 
a  Dean  of  Bristol,  educated  at  Eton  and  Christ  Church,  an  early 
Edinburgh  reviewer,  and  an  honoured  pundit  and  champion  of 
the  Whig  party,  possessing  also  great  literary  tastes,  much  industry, 
and  considerable  faculty  both  of  judging  and  writing,  united 
almost  all  the  qualifications  for  a  high  reputation;  while  his 
abstinence  from  public  affairs,  and  from  participation  in  the 
violent  half-personal,  half-political  squabbles  which  were  common 
among  the  literary  men  of  his  day,  freed  him  from  most  of  the 
disadvantages,  while  retaining  for  him  all  the  advantages,  of  party 
connections.  Early,  too,  he  obtained  a  post  in  the  Civil  Service 
(a  Commissionership  of  Audit),  which  gave  him  a  comfortable 
subsistence  while  leaving  him  plenty  of  leisure.  For  thirty  years, 
between  1818  and  1848,  he  produced  a  series  of  books  on  political 
and  literary  history  which  at  once  attained  a  very  high  reputation, 
and  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  yet  lost  it.  These  were  a  View 
of  the  State  of  Europe  during  the  Middle  Ages,  published  in  the 
first,  and  supplemented  by  a  volume  of  notes  and  corrections  in 
the  last,  of  the  years  just  mentioned ;  a  Constitutional  History  oj 
England  horn  Henry  VII.  to  George  II.  (1827);  and  an  Intro- 
duction to  the  Literature  of  Europe  in  the  Fifteenth,  Sixteenth, 
and  Seventeenth  Centuries  (1837-1839). 

The  value  of  Hallam  as  a  political  and  as  a  literary  historian 
is  by  no  means  the  same.  In  the  former  capacity  he  was  perhaps 
too  much  influenced  by  that  artificial  and  rather  curious  ideal  of 
politics  which  distinguished  the  Whig  party  of  the  later  eighteenth 
century,  which  was  exaggerated,  celebrated  brilliantly,  and  perhaps 
buried  by  his  pupil  and  younger  contemporary,  Macaulay,  and 
which  practically  erects  the  result  of  a  coincidence  of  accidents 
in  English  history  into  a  permanent  and  rationally  defensible 
form  of  government,  comparable  with  and  preferable  to  the  earlier 
and  unchanging  forms  of  monarchy,  aristocracy,  and  democracy 
with  their  sub-varieties.  A  certain  coldness  and  sluggishness  of 


214  THK  HISTORIANS  OF  Tim  CENTURY  CHAP. 

temperament  and  sympathy  also  marred  this  part  of  Hallam's 
work,  though  less  mischievously  than  elsewhere.  But  to  balance 
these  drawbacks  handsomely  in  his  favour,  he  possessed  an 
industry  which,  immense  as  have  been  the  pains  spent  on  his 
subjects  since  he  wrote,  leaves  him  in  possession  of  a  very  fair 
part  of  the  field  as  a  still  trustworthy  authority ;  a  mind,  on  the 
whole,  judicial  and  fair ;  and  an  excellently  clear  and  scholarly  if 
not  exactly  brilliant  or  engaging  style. 

As  a  literary  historian  and  critic  Hallam  deserves,  except  on 
the  score  of  industry  and  width  of  reading,  rather  less  praise ; 
and  his  dicta,  once  quoted  with  veneration  even  by  good  authori- 
ties, and  borrowed,  with  or  without  acknowledgment,  by  nearly  all 
second-hand  writers,  are  being  more  and  more  neglected  by  both. 
Nor  is  this  unjust,  for  Hallam,  though  possessed,  as  has  been 
said,  of  sound  and  wide  scholarship,  and  of  a  taste  fairly  trust- 
worthy in  accepted  and  recognised  matters,  was  too  apt  to  be  at 
a  loss  when  confronted  with  an  abnormal  or  eccentric  literary  per- 
sonality, shared  far  too  much  the  hide-bound  narrowness  of  the 
rules  which  guided  his  friend  Jeffrey,  lacked  the  enthusiasm 
which  not  seldom  melted  Jeffrey's  chains  of  ice,  and  was  con- 
stantly apt  to  intrude  into  the  court  of  literary  judgments  methods, 
procedures,  and  codes  of  law  which  have  no  business  there. 

Many  other  estimable,  and  some  excellent  writers  fill  up  the 
space  of  fifty  years,  which  may  be  described  best,  both  for  remem- 
brance and  for  accuracy,  as  the  space  between  Gibbon  and 
Carlyle.  William  Roscoe,  who  was  born  as  far  back  as  1753  and 
did  not  die  till  1831,  was  the  son  of  a  market-gardener  near 
Liverpool,  and  had  few  advantages  of  education,  but  became  an 
attorney,  attached  himself  strenuously  to  literature,  especially 
Italian  literature,  and  in  1796  published  his  Life  of  Lorenzo  de 
Medici,  which,  after  finishing  it,  he  followed  up  nine  years  later 
with  the  Life  of  Leo  the  Tenth.  Both  obtained  not  merely  an 
English  but  a  Continental  reputation,  both  became  in  a  manner 
classics,  and  both  retain  value  to  this  day,  though  the  Italian 
Renaissance  has  been  a  specially  favourite  subject  of  modern 


MITFORD— L1NGARD  215 


inquiry.  Roscoe  was  a  violent  Whig,  and  not  a  very  dis- 
passionate student  in  some  respects ;  but  he  wrote  well,  and  he  is 
an  early  example  of  the  diffusion  of  the  historic  spirit  proper,  in 
which  Gibbon  had  at  once  set  the  example  and,  with  some  lapses, 
attained  nearly  to  perfection. 

William  Mitford  (1744-1827)  was  even  an  older  man  than 
Roscoe,  and  belonged  to  a  slightly  less  modern  school  of  history- 
writing.  He  was  a  man  of  means,  a  friend  of  Gibbon,  his  fellow- 
officer  in  the  militia,  and  like  him  a  strong  Tory.  He  was  also 
one  of  the  earliest  students  of  English  rhythms.  Although 
Mitford's  hatred  of  democracy,  whether  well  or  ill-founded,  makes 
him  sometimes  unfair,  and  though  his  History  of  Greece  contains 
some  blunders,  it  is  on  the  whole  rather  a  pity  that  it  should 
have  been  superseded  to  the  extent  to  which  it  actually  has  been 
by  those  of  Grote  and  Thirlwall.  For  it  is  not  more  prejudiced 
and  much  better  written  than  Grote's,  while  it  has  greater  liveli- 
ness and  zest  than  the  Bishop's.  It  occupied  more  than  thirty 
years  in  publication,  the  first  volume  appearing  in  1784,  the  last 
in  1818. 

While  Roscoe  and  Mitford  were  thus  dealing  with  foreign  and 
ancient  subjects,  English  history  became  the  theme  of  a  somewhat 
younger  pair  of  historians,  one  of  whom,  Sharon  Turner,  was 
born  in  1768  and  died  in  1847  ;  while  John  Lingard,  born  three 
years  later,  outlived  Turner  by  four.  Lingard  was  a  Roman 
Catholic  priest,  and  after  being  educated  at  Douai,  divided  most 
of  his  time  between  pastoral  work  and  teaching  at  the  newly- 
founded  Roman  Catholic  school  of  Ushaw.  He  was  the  author 
of  what  still  retains  the  credit  of  being  the  best  history  of  England 
on  the  great  scale,  in  point  of  the  union  of  accuracy,  skilful 
arrangement,  fairness  (despite  his  inevitable  prepossessions),  and 
competent  literary  form, — no  mean  credit  for  a  member  of  an 
unpopular  minority  to  have  attained  in  a  century  of  the  most 
active  historical  investigation.  Turner  was  more  of  a  specialist 
and  particularist,  and  his  style  is  not  very  estimable.  He  wrote 
many  books  on  English  history,  those  on  the  later  periods  being 


2 1 6  TIIF.  HISTORIANS  OF  Til  1C  CHNTURV 


of  little  value.  Hut  his  History  of  the  Anglo-Saxons^  first  issued 
in  1799,  was  based  on  thorough  icsearch,  and  may  be  said  to 
have  for  the  first  time  rescued  the  period  of  origins  of  English 
history  from  the  discreditable  condition  of  perfunctory,  traditional, 
and  second-  or  third-hand  treatment  in  which  most,  if  not  all, 
previous  historians  of  England  had  been  content  to  leave  it. 

Sir  Francis  Palgrave,  another  historian  to  whom  the  student 
of  early  English  history  is  deeply  indebted,  was  born  in  London 
in  1788,  his  paternal  name  being  Cohen.  He  took  to  the  law, 
and  early  devoted  himself  both  within  and  outside  his  profession  to 
genealogical  and  antiquarian  research.  Before  much  attention  had 
been  paid  in  France  itself  to  Old  French,  he  published  a  collection 
of  Anglo-Norman  poems  in  1818,  and  from  these  studies  he 
passed  to  that  of  English  history  as  such.  He  was  knighted  in 
1832,  and  made  Deputy- Keeper  of  the  Records  in  1838,  his 
tenure  of  this  post  being  only  terminated  by  his  death  in  1861. 
Palgrave  edited  many  State  documents  (writs,  calendars,  rolls, 
and  so  forth),  and  in  his  last  years  executed  a  History  of 
Normandy  and  England  of  great  value.  His  eldest  son,  Francis 
Turner  (1824-97),  long  connected  with  the  Education  Office,  was 
a  critic,  a  poet,  Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford,  and  editor,  among 
other  things,  of  the  admirable  Golden  Treasury  ;  while  the  second, 
William  Clifford,  who  was  born  in  1826  and  died  in  1888,  Minister 
at  Monte  Video,  was  a  man  of  the  most  brilliant  talents  and 
the  most  varied  career.  He  was  a  soldier,  a  Jesuit,  a  traveller 
in  the  most  forbidden  parts  of  Arabia  at  the  expense  of  a  foreign 
country,  and  for  nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century  a  member  of  the 
consular  and  diplomatic  service  of  his  own.  His  Narratire  of 
his  Arabian  journey,  his  Dutch  Guiana,  and  some  remarkable 
poems,  are  only  a  few  of  his  works,  all  of  which  have  strong 
character. 

Nearly  contemporary  with  these  was  Dr.  Thomas  M'Crie  (1772- 
1835),  whose  JJres  of  Knox  (1812)  and  Melrillt  (1819)  entitle  him 
to  something  like  the  title  of  Historian  of  Scotch  Presbyterianism 
in  its  militant  period.  M'Crie,  who  was  styled  by  Hal'am  (a  person 


MINOR  HISTORIANS  217 


not  given  to  nicknames)  "the  Protestant  Hildebrand,"  was  a 
worthy  and  learned  man  of  untiring  industry,  and  his  subjects  so 
intimately  concern  not  merely  Scottish  but  British  history  for 
nearly  two  centuries,  that  his  handling  of  them  could  not  but  be 
important.  But  he  was  desperately  prejudiced,  and  his  furious 
attack  on  Sir  Walter  Scott's  Old  Mortality,  by  which  he  is 
perhaps  known  to  more  persons  than  by  his  own  far  from  un- 
interesting works,  argues  a  crass  deficiency  in  intellectual  and 
aesthetic  comprehension. 

The  tenth  decade  of  the  eighteenth  century  was  as  much  a 
decade  of  historians  as  the  eighth  had  been  a  decade  of  poets ; 
and  with  Milman  and  Tytler  born  in  1791,  Alison  in  1792,  Grote 
in  1/94,  Arnold  and  Carlyle  in  1795,  Thirlwall  in  1797,  and 
Macaulay  in  1800,  it  may  probably  challenge  comparison  with 
any  period  of  equal  length.  The  batch  falls  into  three  pretty 
distinct  classes,  and  the  individual  members  of  it  are  also  pretty 
widely  separated  in  importance,  so  that  it  may  be  more  convenient 
to  discuss  them  in  the  inverse  order  of  their  merit  rather  than  in 
the  direct  order  of  their  births. 

Patrick  Fraser  Tytler,  son  and  grandson  of  historians  (his 
grandfather  William  being  the  first  and  not  the  worst  champion 
of  Queen  Mary  against  the  somewhat  Philistine  estimates  of 
Hume  and  Robertson,  and  his  father  Alexander  a  Professor  of 
History,  a  Scotch  Judge,  and  an  excellent  writer  in  various  kinds 
of  belles  lettres),  was  a  man  of  the  finest  character,  the  friend  of 
most  of  the  great  men  of  letters  at  Edinburgh  in  the  age  of  Scott 
and  Jeffrey,  and  the  author  of  an  excellent  History  of  Scotland 
from  Alexander  the  Third  to  the  Union  of  the  Crowns.  He  was 
born  in  1791,  was  called  to  the  Scotch  Bar  in  1813,  and  died 
young  for  a  historian  (a  class  which  has  so  much  to  do  with  Time 
that  he  is  apt  to  be  merciful  to  it)  in  1849.  He  was  perhaps  hardly 
a  man  of  genius,  but  he  commanded  universal  respect.  Sir  Archi- 
bald Alison  was  the  son  of  a  clergyman  of  the  same  name,  who,  after 
taking  orders  in  England  and  holding  some  benefices  there,  became 
known  as  the  author  of  Essays  on  the  Principles  of  Taste,  which 


218  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

possess  a  good  deal  of  formal  and  some  real  merit.  Archibald  the 
younger  was  highly  distinguished  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh, 
was  called  to  the  Scotch  Bar,  and  distinguished  himself  there  also, 
being  ultimately  appointed  Sheriff  of  Lanarkshire.  Like  most  of 
the  brighter  wits  among  his  immediate  contemporaries  in  Scot- 
land (we  have  the  indisputable  testimony  of  Jeffrey  to  the  fact) 
Alison  was  an  out-and-out  Tory,  and  a  constant  contributor  to 
Blackwood)  while  his  literary  activity  took  very  numerous  shapes. 
At  last  he  began,  and  in  the  twenty  years  from  1839  to  1859 
carried  through,  a  History  of  Europe  during  the  French  Resolution, 
completed  by  one  of  Europe  from  the  Fall  of  the  First  to  the 
Accession  of  the  Tliird  Napoleon.  He  died  in  1867.  It  was 
rather  unfortunate  for  Alison  that  he  did  not  undertake  this  great 
work  until  the  period  of  Liberal  triumph  which  marked  the 
middle  decades  of  the  century  had  well  set  in.  It  was  still  more 
unlucky,  and  it  could  less  be  set  down  to  the  operations  of 
unkind  chance,  that  in  many  of  the  qualifications  of  the  writer 
in  general,  and  the  historical  writer  in  particular,  he  was  deficient. 
He  had  energy  and  industry ;  he  was  much  less  inaccurate  than 
it  was  long  the  fashion  to  represent  him  ;  a  high  sense  of 
patriotism  and  the  political  virtues  generally,  a  very  fair  faculty 
of  judging  evidence,  and  a  thorough  interest  in  his  subject  were 
his.  But  his  book  was  most  unfortunately  diffuse,  earning  its 
author  the  sobriquet  of  "  Mr.  Wordy,''  and  it  was  conspicuously 
lacking  in  grasp,  both  in  the  marshalling  of  events  and  in  the 
depicting  of  characters.  Critics,  even  when  they  sympathised, 
have  never  liked  it ;  but  contrary  to  the  wont  of  very  lengthy 
histories,  it  found  considerable  favour  with  the  public,  who,  as 
the  French  gibe  has  it,  were  not  "hampered  by  the  style,"  and 
who  probably  found  in  the  popular  explanation  of  a  great  series 
of  important  and  interesting  affairs  all  that  they  cared  for.  Nor 
is  it  unlikely  that  this  popularity  rather  exaggerated  the  ill-will  of  the 
critics  themselves.  Alison  is  not  quotable  ;  he  is,  even  after  youth, 
read  with  no  small  difficulty  ;  but  it  would  be  no  bad  thing  if 
other  periods  of  history  had  been  treated  in  his  manner  and  spirit. 


V  MILMAN  219 

Henry  Hart  Milman  belongs  to  very  much  the  same  class  of 
historian  as  Hallam,  but  unlike  Hallam  he  was  a  poet,  and, 
though  a  Broad  Churchman  of  the  days  before  the  nickname  was 
given,  more  of  an  adherent  to  the  imaginative  and  traditional 
side  of  things.  His  father  was  a  King's  physician,  and  he  was 
educated  at  Eton  and  Brasenose.  He  obtained  the  Newdigate, 
and  after  bringing  out  his  best  play  Fazio  (of  which  more  will  be 
said  later),  took  orders  and  received  the  vicarage  of  St.  Mary's, 
Reading.  Some  poems  of  merit  in  the  second  class,  including 
some  hymns  very  nearly  in  the  first,  followed,  and  in 
1821  he  became  Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford,  where  six  years 
later  he  was  Bampton  Lecturer.  It  was  in  1829  that  Milman, 
who  had  been  a  frequent  contributor  to  the  Quarterly  Review, 
began  the  series  of  his  works  on  ecclesiastical  history  with  the 
rlistory  of  the  Jews,  the  weakest  of  them  (for  Milman  was  not  a 
very  great  Hebraist,  and  while  endeavouring  to  avoid  rigid 
orthodoxy  did  not  satisfy  the  demands  of  the  newer  heterodox 
criticism).  The  History  of  Christianity  to  the  Abolition  of 
Paganism  was  better  (1840),  and  the  History  of  Latin  Christianity 
(1854)  better  still.  This  last  indeed,  based  on  an  erudition  which 
enabled  Milman  to  re-edit  Gibbon  with  advantage,  is  a  great  book, 
and  will  probably  live.  For  Milman  here  really  knew ;  he  had 
(like  most  poets  who  write  prose  with  fair  practice)  an  excellent 
style ;  and  he  was  able — as  many  men  who  have  had  knowledge 
have  not  been  able,  and  as  many  who  have  had  style  have  not 
tried  or  have  failed  to  do — to  rise  to  the  height  of  a  really  great 
argument,  and  treat  it  with  the  grasp  and  ease  which  are  the  soul 
of  history.  That  he  owed  much  to  Gibbon  himself  is  certain  ; 
that  he  did  not  fail  to  use  his  pupilage  to  that  greatest  of 
historians  so  as  to  rank  among  the  best  of  his  followers  is  not 
less  certain,  and  is  high  enough  praise  for  any  man.  He  received 
the  Deanery  of  St.  Paul's  in  1849,  and  held  it  till  his  death  in 
1868,  having  worthily  sustained  the  glory  of  this  the  most 
literary  of  all  great  preferments  in  the  Church  of  England  by 
tradition,  and  having  earned  among  English  ecclesiastical 


THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY 


historians   a    place   like    that    of  Napier    among   their    military 
comrades. 

Hallam  and  Milman  were  both,  as  has  been  said,  Oxford  men, 
and  the  unmistakable  impress  of  that  University  was  on  both, 
though  less  on  Hallam  than  on  Milman.  It  is  all  the  more 
interesting  that  their  chief  historical  contemporaries  of  the  same 
class  were,  the  one  a  Cambridge  man,  and  one  of  the  most  dis- 
tinguished, the  other  not  a  University  man  at  all.  Both  Grote 
and  Thirlwall,  as  it  happens,  were  educated  at  the  same  public 
school,  Charterhouse.  George  Grote,  the  elder  of  them,  born  in 
1794,  was  the  son  of  a  banker,  and  himself  carried  on  that 
business  for  many  years  of  his  life.  He  was  an  extreme  Liberal, 
or  as  it  then  began  to  be  called,  Radical,  and  a  chief  of  the 
Philosophical  Radicals  of  his  time  —  persons  who  followed 
Bentham  and  the  elder  Mill.  He  was  elected  member  for  the 
City  in  the  first  Reform  Parliament,  and  held  the  seat  for  nine 
years,  though  if  he  had  not  retired  he  would  probably  have  been 
turned  out.  Leaving  Parliament  in  1841,  he  left  business  two 
years  later,  and  gave  himself  up  to  his  History  of  Greece,  which 
was  published  in  the  ten  years  between  1846  and  1856.  He 
died  in  1871,  and  was  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey.  So  was, 
four  years  later,  his  school-fellow,  fellow-historian  of  Greece,  and 
junior  by  three  years,  Connop  Thirlwall.  Thirlwall  was  one  of 
the  rare  examples  of  extraordinary  infant  precocity  (he  could 
read  Latin  at  three  and  Greek  at  four)  who  have  been  great 
scholars  and  men  of  distinction  in  after  life,  and  to  a  ripe  age. 
He  was  of  a  Northumbrian  family,  but  was  born  at  Stepney. 
From  Charterhouse  he  went  rather  early  (in  1814)  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  where  he  had  almost  the  most  brilliant 
undergraduate  career  on  record,  and  duly  gained  his  Fellowship. 
He  entered  Lincoln's  Inn,  was  actually  called  to  the  Bar,  but 
preferred  the  Church,  and  took  orders  in  his  thirtieth  year. 
He  had  already  shown  a  strong  leaning  to  theology,  and  had 
translated  Schleiermacher.  He  now  returned  to  Cambridge, 
taking  both  tutorial  work  and  cure  of  souls;  but  in  1834  his 


GROTE— THIRLWALL 


Liberal  views  attracted  the  disfavour  of  Christopher  Wordsworth, 
Master  of  Trinity,  and  Thirlwall,  resigning  his  tutorship,  was 
consoled  by  Brougham  with  a  Yorkshire  living.  Nor  was  this 
long  his  only  preferment,  for  the  Whigs  were  not  too  well  off  for 
clergymen  who  united  scholarship,  character,  and  piety,  and  he 
was  made  Bishop  of  St.  David's  in  1840.  He  held  the  see  for 
thirty-four  years,  working  untiringly,  earning  justly  (though  his 
orthodoxy  was  of  a  somewhat  Broad  character,  and  he  could 
reconcile  his  conscience  to  voting  for  the  disestablishment  of 
the  Irish  Church)  the  character  of  one  of  the  most  exemplary 
bishops  of  the  century,  and  seldom  dining  without  a  cat  on  his 
shoulder. 

Thirlwall  wrote  many  Charges,  some  of  them  famous,  some 
delightful  letters,  part  of  a  translation  of  Niebuhr,  and  some 
essays ;  while  Grote,  besides  his  historical  work,  produced  some 
political  and  other  work  before  it,  with  a  large  but  not  very  good 
book  on  Plato,  and  the  beginning  of  another  on  Aristotle  after  it. 
But  it  is  by  their  Histories  of  Greece  that  they  must  live  in 
literature.  These  histories  (of  which  Crete's  was  planned  and 
begun  as  early  as  1823,  though  not  completed  till  long  afterwards, 
while  ThirlwaU's  began  to  appear  in  1835,  and  was  finished  just 
after  Grote's  saw  the  light)  were  both  written  with  a  certain 
general  similarity  of  point  of  view  as  antidotes  to  Mitford,  and  as 
putting  the  Liberal  view  of  the  ever  memorable  and  ever  typical 
history  of  the  Greek  states.  But  in  other  respects  they  diverge 
widely ;  and  it  has  been  a  constant  source  of  regret  to  scholars 
that  the  more  popular,  and  as  the  French  would  say  iapageur, 
of  the  two,  to  a  considerable  extent  eclipsed  the  solid  worth  and 
the  excellent  form  of  Thirlwall.  Grote's  history  displays  immense 
painstaking  and  no  inconsiderable  scholarship,  though  it  is  very 
nearly  as  much  a  "  party  pamphlet "  as  Macaulay's  own,  the 
advocate's  client  being  in  this  case  not  merely  the  Athenian 
democracy  but  even  the  Athenian  demagogue.  Yet  it  to  a 
great  extent  redeems  this  by  the  vivid  way  in  which  it  makes 
the  subject  alive,  and  turns  Herodotus  and  Thucydides, 


THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY 


Demosthenes  and  Xenophon,  from  dead  texts  and  school-books 
into  theses  of  eager  and  stimulating  interest.  But  it  has 
absolutely  no  style ;  its  scale  is  much  too  great ;  the  endless 
discussions  and  arguments  on  quite  minor  points  tend  to  throw 
the  whole  out  of  focus,  and  to  disaccustom  the  student's  eye 
and  mind  to  impartial  and  judicial  handling ;  and  the  reader 
constantly  sighs  for  the  placid  Olympian  grasp  of  Gibbon,  nay, 
even  for  the  confident  dogmatism  of  Macaulay  himself,  instead 
of  the  perpetual  singlestick  of  argument  which  clatters  and 
flourishes  away  to  the  utter  discomposure  of  the  dignity  of  the 
Historic  Muse. 

It  is  possible,  on  the  other  hand,  that  Thirlwall  may  have 
sacrificed  a  little  too  much,  considering  his  age  and  its  demands, 
to  mere  dispassionate  dignity.  He  is  seldom  picturesque,  and 
indeed  he  never  tries  to  be  so.  But  to  a  scholarship  naturally 
far  superior  to  G  rote's,  he  united  a  much  fairer  and  more  judicial 
mind,  and  the  faculty  of  writing — instead  of  loose  stuff  not  exactly 
ungrammatical  nor  always  uncomely,  but  entirely  devoid  of  any 
grace  of  style — an  excellent  kind  of  classical  English,  but  slightly 
changed  from  the  best  eighteenth  century  models.  And  he  had 
what  Grote  lacked,  the  gift  of  seeing  that  the  historian  need  not 
— nay,  that  he  ought  not  to — parade  every  detail  of  the  argu- 
ments by  which  he  has  reached  his  conclusions,  but  should 
state  those  conclusions  themselves,  reserving  himself  for  occasional 
emergencies  in  which  process  as  well  as  result  may  be  properly 
exhibited.  It  is  fair  to  say,  in  putting  this  curious  pair  forward 
as  examples  respectively  of  the  popular  and  scholarly  methods 
of  historical  writing,  that  Grote's  learning  and  industry  were  very 
much  more  than  popular,  while  ThirlwaH's  sense  and  style  might 
with  advantage  have  put  on,  now  and  then,  a  little  more  pomp 
and  circumstance.  But  still  the  contrast  holds ;  and  until  fresh 
discoveries  like  that  of  the  Atlicnian  Polity  accumulate  to  an 
extent  which  calls  for  and  obtains  a  new  real  historian  of  Greece, 
it  is  Thirlwall  and  not  Gn.tr  who  deserves  the  first  rank  as  such 
in  English. 


THOMAS  ARNOLD  223 


Intimately  connected  with  all  these  historians  in  time  and 
style,  but  having  over  them  the  temporary  advantage  of  being 
famous  in  another  way,  and  the,  as  some  think,  permanent  dis- 
advantage of  falling  prematurely  out  of  public  favour,  was  Thomas 
Arnold.  He  was  born  at  Cowes,  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  on  i3th 
June  1795,  and  was  educated  at  Winchester  and  at  Corpus 
Christi  College,  Oxford.  At  the  age  of  twenty  he  was  elected 
a  Fellow  of  Oriel — a  distinction  which  was,  and  remained  for  two 
decades,  almost  the  highest  in  the  University — and  he  gained 
both  Chancellor's  Essay  prizes,  for  Latin  and  English.  Oriel  was 
not  in  his  time,  as  it  was  very  shortly  afterwards,  a  centre  of 
ecclesiastical  orthodoxy,  but  rather  the  home  of  a  curious 
transition  blend  of  thought  which  in  different  persons  took  the 
high-and-dry  or  the  Rationalist  direction,  and  was  only  generally 
opposed  to  Evangelicalism.  Arnold  himself  inclined  to  the 
Liberal  side,  and  had  also  strong  personal  gifts  for  teaching.  He 
took  orders,  but  neither  became  a  tutor  nor  took  a  living,  and 
established  himself  at  Laleham,  on  the  Thames,  to  take  private 
pupils.  After  ten  years'  practice  here  he  was  elected  to  the  Head- 
mastership  of  Rugby,  a  school  then,  after  vicissitudes,  holding 
little  if  anything  more  than  a  medium  place  among  those  English 
Grammar  Schools  which  ranked  below  the  great  schools  of  Eton, 
Harrow,  Westminster,  Winchester,  and  Charterhouse.  How  he 
succeeded  in  placing  it  on  something  like  an  equality  with  these, 
and  how  on  the  other  hand  he  became,  as  it  were,  the  apostle  of 
the  infant  Broad  Church  School,  which  held  aloof  alike  from 
Evangelicals  and  Tractarians,  are  points  which  do  not  directly 
concern  us.  His  more  than  indirect  influence  on  literature  was 
great ;  for  few  schools  have  contributed  to  it,  in  the  same  time, 
a  greater  number  of  famous  writers  than  Rugby  did  under  his 
head-mastership.  His  direct  connection  with  it  was  limited  to 
a  fair  number  of  miscellaneous  works,  many  sermons,  an 
edition  of  Thucydides,  and  a  History  of  Rome  which  did  not 
proceed  (owing  to  his  death  in  1842,  just  after  he  had  been 
appointed  Regius  Professor  of  Modern  History  at  Oxford) 


224  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 


beyond  the  Second  Punic  War.  Arnold,  once  perhaps  in- 
judiciously extolled  by  adoring  pupils,  and  the  defender  of  a 
theory  of  churchmanship  which  strains  rather  to  the  uttermost 
the  principle  of  unorthodox  economy,  has  rather  sunk  between 
the  undying  disapproval  of  the  orthodox  and  the  fact  that  the 
unorthodox  have  long  left  his  stand-point.  But  his  style  is 
undoubtedly  of  its  own  kind  scholarly  and  excellent ;  the  matter 
of  his  history  suffers  from  the  common  fault  of  taking  Niebuhr 
at  too  high  a  valuation. 

Thomas  Babington  Macaulay  (who  may  be  conveniently  dis- 
cussed before  Carlyle,  though  he  was  Carlyle's  junior  by  five  years, 
inasmuch  as,  even  putting  relative  critical  estimate  aside,  he  died 
much  earlier  and  represented  on  the  whole  an  older  style  of 
thought)  was  born  at  Rothley  Temple  in  Leicestershire  on 
25th  October  1800.  His  father,  Zachary  Macaulay,  though  a 
very  active  agitator  against  the  Slave  Trade,  was  a  strong  Tory ; 
and  the  son's  conversion  to  Whig  opinions  was  effected  at  some  not 
clearly  ascertained  period  after  he  had  reached  manhood.  A 
very  precocious  child,  he  was  at  first  privately  educated,  but  entered 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  at  the  age  of  eighteen.  Here  he  fell 
in  with  a  set  somewhat  but  not  much  less  distinguished  than  that 
of  the  famous  time,  about  ten  years  later,  of  which  Tennyson  was 
the  centre — a  set  the  most  brilliant  member  of  which,  besides 
Macaulay,  was  the  poet  Praed.  Praed  had  been  accustomed  to 
journalism  before  he  left  Eton,  and  had  made  acquaintance  at 
Windsor  with  the  bookseller  Knight,  for  whose  Quarterly 
Magazine  both  he  and  Macaulay  wrote  some  very  good  things. 
Macaulay  himself  obtained  the  Chancellor's  prize  for  English 
poems  on  "  Pompeii  "  and  "  Evening,"  in  two  successive  years 
1819  and  1820;  and  after  a  very  distinguished  undergraduate 
career  was  elected  Fellow  of  his  college.  He  went  to  the  Bar, 
and  his  father's  fortune,  which  had  been  a  good  one,  being  lost, 
his  chances  were  for  a  time  uncertain.  In  1825,  however,  he  won 
the  admiration  of  Jeffrey  and  a  place  on  the  Edinburgh  Review 
by  his  well-known,  and  slightly  gaudy,  but  wonderfully  fresh  and 


MACAULAY  225 


stimulating  article  on  Milton  ;  and  literature,  which  had  always 
been  his  ideal  employment,  seemed  already  likely  to  yield  him  a 
fair  subsistence — for  review-writing  was  at  that  time  much  more 
highly  paid  than  it  is  at  present.  Moreover  the  Whigs,  on  the  eve 
of  their  long  postponed  triumph,  were  looking  out  for  young  men 
of  talent ;  and  Macaulay,  being  recruited  by  them,  was  put  into 
Lord  Lansdowne's  pocket -borough  of  Calne.  In  the  Reform 
debates  themselves  he  distinguished  himself  greatly,  and  after  the 
Bill  was  carried,  having  been  elected  for  Leeds,  he  was  not  long 
in  receiving  his  reward.  It  was  munificent,  for  he,  a  man  of  little 
more  than  thirty,  who  had  made  no  reputation  at  the  Bar,  though 
much  elsewhere,  was  appointed  Legal  Member  of  Council  in 
India  with  a  salary  very  much  of  which  could  in  those  days  be 
saved  by  a  careful  man,  especially  if,  like  Macaulay,  he  was  un- 
married. Accordingly  when,  after  between  four  and  five  years' 
stay,  Macaulay  in  1838  returned  home,  he  was  in  possession  of 
means  sufficient  to  enable  him  to  devote  himself  without  fear  or 
hindrance  to  literary  and  political  pursuits,  while  his  fame  had 
been  raised  higher  during  his  absence  by  his  contributions  to  the 
Edinburgh  Review.  Indeed  his  Indian  experiences  furnished  the 
information — erroneous  in  some  cases  and  partisan  in  others,  but 
brilliantly  used  —  enabling  him  to  write  the  famous  essays  on 
Clive  and  on  Hastings,  where  his  historical  method  is  at  almost  its 
best.  He  was  elected  member  for  Edinburgh,  a  very  high  compli- 
ment, in  1839;  ar>d  next  year  became  Secretary  for  War.  In 
1842  and  1843  respectively  he  established  his  position  in  verse 
and  prose  by  publishing  the  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome  and  a  collec- 
tion of  his  Essays  ;  and  in  1846  he  was  made  Paymaster-General. 
But  his  support  of  the  Maynooth  Grant  offended  the  Protestantism 
of  his  constituents,  and  he  lost  his  seat,  and  for  the  time  his 
political  opportunities,  in  1847.  The  disaster  was  no  disaster  for 
literature  :  he  had  long  been  employed  on  a  History  of  England 
from  the  Accession  of  James  //.,  and  being  now  able  to  devote  his 
whole  time  to  it,  he  published  the  first  volumes  in  1848  with 
astonishing  success. 

Q 


226  TIIK  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CKNTURY  CHAP. 


He  was  re-elected  for  Edinburgh  in  1852,  published  the  third 
and  fourth  volumes  of  his  History  in  1855  with  success  greater 
in  pecuniary  ways  and  otherwise  than  even  that  of  their  fore- 
runners, was  raised  to  the  Upper  House  as  Lord  Macaulay  of 
Rothley  in  1857,  and  died  two  years  later,  on  28th  December 
1859,  of  heart  disease.  Some  personal  peculiarities  of  Macaulay's 
— his  extraordinary  reading  and  memory,  his  brilliant  but  rather 
tyrannical  conversation,  his  undoubting  self-confidence — were 
pretty  well  known  in  his  lifetime,  and  did  not  always  create  a 
prejudice  in  his  favour.  But  a  great  revolution  in  this  respect 
was  brought  about  by  the  Life  of  him,  produced  a  good  many 
years  later  by  his  nephew,  Sir  Gtorge  Trevelyan — a  Life,  standing 
for  the  interest  of  its  matter  and  the  skill  and  taste  of  its  manner, 
not  too  far  below  the  masterpieces  of  Boswell  and  Lockhart. 

The  literary  personality  of  Macaulay,  though  a  great  one  in  all 
respects,  is  neither  complex  nor  unequally  present,  and  it  is  there- 
fore desirable  to  discuss  all  its  manifestations  together.  In  the 
order  of  importance  and  of  bulk  his  work  may  be  divided  into 
verse,  prose  essays,  and  history,  for  his  speeches  less  directly  con- 
cern us,  and  are  very  little  more  than  essays  adroitly  enough 
adjusted  so  as  not  to  be  tedious  to  the  hearer.  In  all  three 
capacities  he  was  eminently  popular  ;  and  in  all  three  his  popu- 
larity has  brought  with  it  a  sort  of  reaction,  partly  justified,  partly 
unjust.  The  worst  brunt  of  this  reaction  has  fallen  upon  his 
verse,  the  capital  division  of  which,  the  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  was 
persistently  decried  by  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold,  the  critic  of  most 
authority  in  the  generation  immediately  succeeding  Macaulay's. 
A  poet  of  the  very  highest  class  Macaulay  was  not ;  his  way  of 
thought  was  too  positive,  too  clear,  too  destitute  either  of  mystery 
or  of  dream,  to  command  or  to  impart  the  true  poetical  mirage,  to 
"make  the  common  as  if  it  were  not  common."  His  best  efforts 
of  this  kind  are  in  small  and  not  very  generally  known  things,  the 
"Jacobite's  Epitaph,"  "  The  Last  Buccaneer."  But  his  ballads 
earlier  and  later,  Ivry,  The  Armada,  Naseby,  and  the  Roman 
quartet,  exhibit  the  result  of  a  consummate  literary  faculty  with  a 


MACAULAY  227 


real  native  gift  for  rhythm  and  metre,  applying  the  lessons  of  the 
great  Romantic  generation  with  extraordinary  vigour  and  success, 
and  not  without  considerable  eloquence  and  refinement.  It  is  a 
gross  and  vulgar  critical  error  to  deem  Macaulay's  poetical  effects 
vulgar  or  gross.  They  are  popular  ;  they  hit  exactly  that  scheme 
of  poetry  which  the  general  ear  can  appreciate  and  the  general 
brain  understand.  They  are  coin  for  general  circulation ;  but  they 
are  not  base  coin.  Hundreds  and  thousands  of  immature  and 
'prentice  tastes  have  been  educated  to  the  enjoyment  of  better 
things  by  them ;  thousands  and  tens  of  thousands  of  tastes, 
respectable  at  least,  have  found  in  them  the  kind  of  poetry  which 
they  can  like,  and  beyond  which  they  are  not  fitted  to  go.  And 
it  would  be  a  very  great  pity  if  there  were  ever  wanting  critical 
appreciations  which,  while  relishing  things  more  exquisite  and 
understanding  things  more  esoteric,  can  still  taste  and  savour  the 
simple  genuine  fare  of  poetry  which  Macaulay  offers.  There  are 
few  wiser  proverbs  than  that  which  cautions  us  against  demanding 
"  better  bread  than  is  made  of  wheat,"  and  the  poetical  bread  of 
the  Lays  of  Ancient  Rome  is  an  honest  household  loaf  that  no 
healthy  palate  will  reject. 

In  the  second  division,  that  of  essay  writing,  Macaulay  occupies 
a  position  both  absolutely  and  relatively  higher.  That  the  best 
verse  ranks  above  even  the  best  prose  is  not  easily  disputable  ; 
that  prose  which  is  among  the  very  best  of  its  own  particular  kind 
ranks  above  verse  which  though  good  is  not  the  best,  may  be 
asserted  without  any  fear.  And  in  their  own  kind  of  essay, 
Macaulay's  are  quite  supreme.  Jeffrey,  a  master  of  writing  and  a 
still  greater  master  of  editing,  with  more  than  twenty  years' 
practice  in  criticism,  asked  him  "where  he  got  that  style?"  The 
question  was  not  entirely  unanswerable.  Macaulay  had  taken 
not  a  little  from  Gibbon ;  he  had  taken  something  from  a  then 
still  living  contributor  of  Jeffrey's  own,  Hazlitt.  But  his  private 
and  personal  note  was  after  all  uppermost  in  the  compound.  It 
had  appeared  early  (it  can  be  seen  in  things  of  his  written  when 
he  was  an  undergraduate).  It  owed  much  to  the  general  atmo- 


228  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

sphere  of  the  century,  to  the  habit  of  drawing  phrase,  illustration, 
idea,  not  merely  from  the  vernacular  or  from  classical  authorities, 
but  from  the  great  writers  of  earlier  European  literature.  And 
it  would  probably  have  been  impossible  without  the  considerable 
body  of  forerunners  which  the  Edinburgh^  the  Quarierly,  and  other 
things  of  which  some  notice  has  been  given  in  a  former  chapter, 
had  supplied.  But  still  the  individual  character  reigns  supreme. 

Macaulay's  Essays  are  in  something  more  than  the  ordinary 
loose  acceptation  of  the  term  a  household  word ;  and  it  cannot 
be  necessary  to  single  out  individual  instances  where  almost  all 
are  famous,  and  where  all  deserve  their  fame.  The  "  Milton  "  and 
the  "Southey,"  the  "Pitt"  and  the  "Chatham,"  the  "  Addison  " 
and  the  "  Horace  Walpole,"  the  "  Clive  "  and  the  "  Hastings,"  the 
"Frederick  the  Great"  and  the  "Madame  D'Arblay,"  the  "Restora- 
tion Dramatists"  and  the  "Boswell,"  the  "  Hallam "  and  the 
"Ranke,"  present  with  a  marvellous  consistency  the  same  merits 
and  the  same  defects.  The  defects  are  serious  enough.  In  the  first 
place  the  system,  which  Macaulay  did  not  invent,  but  which  he 
carried  to  perfection,  of  regarding  the  particular  book  in  hand  less 
as  a  subject  of  elaborate  and  minute  criticism  and  exposition  than 
as  a  mere  starting-point  from  which  to  pursue  the  critic's  own  views 
of  the  subject,  inevitably  leads  to  unfairness,  especially  in  matters 
of  pure  literature.  Macaulay's  most  famous  performance  in  this 
latter  kind,  the  crushing  review  of  the  unlucky  Robert  Montgomery, 
though  well  enough  deserved  in  the  particular  case,  escapes  this 
condemnation  only  to  fall  under  another,  that  of  looking  at  the 
parts  rather  than  at  the  whole.  It  is  quite  certain  that,  given  their 
plan,  the  two  famous  critiques  of  Tennyson  and  Keats,  in  the 
Quarterly  and  in  Blackwood,  are  well  enough  justified.  The  critic 
looks  only  at  the  weak  parts,  and  he  judges  the  weak  parts  only 
by  the  stop-watch.  But,  on  his  own  wide  and  more  apparently 
generous  method,  Macaulay  was  exposed  to  equal  dangers,  and 
succumbed  to  them  less  excusably.  He  had  strong  prejudices,  and 
it  is  impossible  for  any  one  who  reads  him  with  knowledge  not  to 
see  that  the  vindication  of  those  prejudices,  rather  than  the 


MACAU  LAY  229 


exposition  and  valuation  of  the  subject,  was  what  he  had  first  at 
heart.  He  was  too  well  informed  (though,  especially  in  the  Indian 
Essays,  he  was  sometimes  led  astray  by  his  authorities),  and  he 
was  too  honest  a  man,  to  be  untrustworthy  in  positive  statement. 
But  though  he  practised  little  in  the  courts,  he  had  the  born 
advocate's  gift,  or  drawback,  of  inclination  to  suppressio  veri  and 
suggestio  falsi)  and  he  has  a  heavy  account  to  make  up  under 
these  heads.  Even  under  them,  perhaps,  he  has  less  to  answer  for 
than  on  the  charge  of  a  general  superficiality  and  shallowness,  which 
is  all  the  more  dangerous  because  of  the  apparently  transparent 
thoroughness  of  his  handling,  and  because  of  the  actual  clearness 
and  force  with  which  he  both  sees  and  puts  his  view.  For  a  first 
draft  of  a  subject  Macaulay  is  incomparable,  if  his  readers  will 
only  be  content  to  take  it  for  a  first  draft,  and  to  feel  that  they 
must  fill  up  and  verify,  that  they  must  deepen  and  widen.  But 
the  heights  and  depths  of  the  subject  he  never  gives,  and  perhaps 
he  never  saw  them. 

Part  of  this  is  no  doubt  to  be  set  down  to  the  quality  of  his 
style ;  part  to  a  weakness  of  his,  which  was  not  so  much  readiness 
to  accept  any  conclusion  that  was  convenient  as  a  constitutional 
incapacity  for  not  making  up  his  mind.  To  leave  a  thing  in  half 
lights,  in  compromise,  to  take  it,  as  the  legal  phrase  of  the  country 
of  his  ancestors  has  it,  ad  avizandum,  was  to  Macaulay  abhorrent 
and  impossible.  He  must  "conclude,"  and  he  was  rather  too 
apt  to  do  so  by  "  quailing,  crushing,  and  quelling  "  all  difficulties 
of  opposing  arguments  and  qualifications.  He  simply  would  not 
have  an  unsolved  problem  mystery.  Strafford  was  a  "  rancorous 
renegade  "  ;  Swift  a  sort  of  gifted  Judas ;  Bacon  a  mean  fellow 
with  a  great  intellect ;  Dryden  again  a  renegade,  though  not 
rancorous  ;  Marlborough  a  self-seeking  traitor  of  genius.  And  all 
these  conclusions  were  enforced  in  their  own  style — the  style  of 
fhomme  meme.  It  was  rather  teasingly  antithetical,  "Tom's 
snip-snap,"  as  the  jealous  smartness  of  Brougham  called  it ;  it 
was  somewhat  mechanical  in  its  arrangement  of  narrative,  set 
passages  of  finer  writing,  cunningly  devised  summaries  of  facts, 


230  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY 


comparisons,  contrasts  (to  show  the  writer's  learning  and  dazzle  the 
reader  with  names),  exordium,  iteration,  peroration,  and  so  forth. 
But  it  observed  a  very  high  standard  of  classical  English,  a  little 
intolerant  of  neologism,  but  not  stiff  nor  jejune.  It  had  an  almost 
unexampled — a  certainly  unsurpassed — power  (slightly  helped  by 
repetition  perhaps)  of  bringing  the  picture  that  the  writer  saw,  the 
argument  that  he  thought,  the  sentiment  that  he  felt,  before  the 
reader's  eyes,  mind,  and  feeling,  And,  as  indeed  follows  from  this, 
it  was  pre-eminently  clear.  It  is  perhaps  the  clearest  style  in 
English  that  does  not,  like  those  of  Swift  and  Cobbett,  deliberately 
or  scornfully  eschew  rhetorical  ornament.  What  Macaulay  means 
you  never,  being  any  degree  short  of  an  idiot,  can  fail  to  under- 
stand ;  and  yet  he  gives  you  the  sense  equipped  with  a  very  con- 
siderable amount  of  preparation  and  trimming.  It  would  not 
merely  have  been  ungrateful,  it  would  have  been  positively  wrong, 
if  his  audience,  specially  trained  as  most  of  them  were  to  his 
stand-point  of  Whig  Reformer,  had  failed  to  hail  him  as  one  of 
the  greatest  writers  that  had  ever  been  known.  Nor  would  it  be 
much  less  wrong  if  judges  very  differently  equipped  and  con- 
stituted were  to  refuse  him  a  high  place  among  great  writers. 

The  characteristics  of  the  Essavs  reproduce  themselves  on  a 
magnified  scale  so  exactly  in  the  History  that  the  foregoing 
criticism  applies  with  absolute  fidelity  to  the  later  and  larger,  as 
well  as  to  the  earlier  and  more  minute  work.  But  it  would  not 
be  quite  fair  to  say  that  no  new  merits  appear.  There  are  no 
new  defects  ;  though  the  difference  of  the  scope  and  character  of 
the  undertaking  intensifies  in  degree,  as  well  as  magnifies  in  bulk, 
the  faults  of  advocacy  and  of  partiality  which  have  caused  the 
book  to  be  dismissed,  with  a  flippancy  only  too  well  deserved  by 
its  own  treatment  of  opponents,  as  "a  Whig  pamphlet  in  four  octavo 
volumes."  Yet  the  width  of  study  and  the  grasp  of  results,  which, 
though  remarkable,  were  not  exactly  extraordinary,  in  the  compass 
and  employed  on  the  subject  of  a  Review  article,  became  altogether 
amazing  and  little  short  of  miraculous  in  this  enlarged  field.  One 
of  the  earliest  and  one  of  the  best  passages,  the  view  of  the  state 


MACAU  LAY  231 


of  England  at  the  death  of  Charles  the  Second,  may  challenge 
comparison,  as  a  clearly  arranged  and  perfectly  mastered  collection 
of  innumerable  minute  facts  sifted  out  of  a  thousand  different 
sources,  with  anything  in  history  ancient  or  modern.  The  scale  of 
the  book  is  undoubtedly  too  great ;  and  if  it  had  been  carried, 
as  the  author  originally  intended,  to  a  date  "  within  the  memory 
of"  his  contemporaries,  it  would  have  required  the  life  of  Old 
Parr  to  complete  it  and  the  patience  of  Job  to  read  it  through. 
The  necessity  of  a  hero  is  a  necessity  felt  by  all  the  nobler  sort 
of  writers.  But  the  choice  of  William  of  Orange  for  the  purpose 
was,  to  say  the  least,  unlucky ;  and  the  low  morality  which  he  had 
himself,  in  an  earlier  work,  confessed  as  to  the  statesmen  of  the 
period  imparted  an  additional  stimulus  to  the  historian's  natural 
tendency  to  be  unfair  to  his  political  opponents,  in  the  vain  hope, 
by  deepening  the  blacks,  to  get  a  sort  of  whiteness  upon  the  grays. 
It  has  further  to  be  confessed  that  independent  examination  of 
separate  points  is  not  very  favourable  to  Macaulay's  trust- 
worthiness. He  never  tells  a  falsehood ;  but  he  not  seldom 
contrives  to  convey  one,  and  he  constantly  conceals  the  truth. 
Still,  the  general  picture  is  so  vivid  and  stimulating,  the  mastery  of 
materials  is  so  consummate,  and  the  beauty  of  occasional  passages 
— the  story  of  Monmouth's  Conspiracy,  that  of  James's  insane 
persecution  of  Magdalen  College,  that  of  the  Trial  of  the  Seven 
Bishops,  that  of  the  Siege  of  Londonderry — so  seductive,  that  the 
most  hostile  criticism  which  is  not  prepared  to  shut  eyes  and  ears 
to  anything  but  faults  cannot  refuse  admiration.  And  it  ought 
not  to  be  omitted  that  Macaulay  was  practically  the  first  historian 
who  not  merely  examined  the  literature  of  his  subject  with  un- 
failing care  and  attention,  but  took  the  trouble  to  inspect  the 
actual  places  with  the  zeal  of  a  topographer  or  an  antiquary.  That 
this  added  greatly  to  the  vividness  and  picturesque  character  of 
his  descriptions  need  hardly  be  said  ;  that  it  often  resulted  in  a 
distinct  gain  to  historical  knowledge  is  certain.  I>ut  perhaps  not 
its  least  merit  was  the  putting  down  in  a  practically  imperishable 
form,  and  in  the  clearest  possible  manner,  of  a  vast  number  of 


232  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP 

interesting  details  which  time  is  only  too  quick  to  sweep  away. 
The  face  of  England  has  changed  more  since  Macaulay's  time, 
though  a  bare  generation  since,  than  it  had  changed  in  the  four 
or  five  generations  between  the  day  of  his  theme  and  his  own ; 
and  thus  he  rescued  for  us  at  once  the  present  and  the  past. 

It  is  almost  impossible  to  imagine  a  greater  contrast  between 
two  contemporaries  of  the  same  nation,  both  men  of  letters  of  the 
first  rank,  than  that  which  exists  between  Thomas  Macaulay  and 
Thomas  Carlyle.  In  the  subjects  to  which  both  had  affinity  there 
was  a  rather  remarkable  connection.  Macaulay's  education  rather 
than  his  sympathies  made  him  something  of  a  master  of  at  least 
the  formal  part  of  poetry,  in  which  Carlyle  could  do  nothing.  But 
essentially  they  were  both  writers  of  prose ;  they  were  both  men 
in  whom  the  historico-politico-social  interests  were  much  greater 
than  the  purely  literary,  the  purely  artistic,  or  the  purely 
scientific — though  just  as  Carlyle  was  a  bad  verse-writer  or  none 
at  all,  Macaulay  a  good  one,  so  Carlyle  was  a  good  mathematician, 
Macaulay  a  bad  one  or  none  at  all.  But  in  the  point  of  view 
from  which  they  regarded  the  subjects  with  which  they  dealt, 
and  in  the  style  in  which  they  treated  them,  they  were  poles 
asunder.  Indeed  it  may  be  questioned  whether  "  the  style  is  the 
point  of  view  "  would  not  be  a  better  form  of  the  famous  de- 
liverance than  that  which,  in  full  or  truncated  form,  has  obtained 
currency. 

Carlyle  was  born  on  the  4th  December  1795  at  Ecclefechan 
(the  Entepfuhl  of  the  Sartor],  in  Dumfriesshire,  being  the  son  cf 
a  stone-mason.  He  was  educated  first  at  the  parish  school,  then 
at  that  of  Annan  (the  nearest  town),  and  was  about  fifteen  when 
he  was  sent,  in  the  usual  way  of  Scotch  boys  with  some  wits 
and  no  money,  to  the  University  of  Edinburgh.  His  destination 
was  equally  of  course  the  Church,  but  he  very  early  developed 
that  dislike  to  all  fixed  formularies  which  characterised  him  through 
life,  and  which  perhaps  was  not  his  greatest  characteristic.  To 
mathematics,  (in  the  other  hand,  he  took  pretty  kindly,  though  he 
seems  to  have  early  exhausted  the  fascinations  of  them  Like 


v  CARLYLE  233 

most  men  of  no  means  who  have  little  fancy  for  any  of  the 
regular  professions,  he  attempted  teaching ;  and  as  a  schoolmaster 
at  Annan,  Haddington,  and  Kirkcaldy,  or  a  private  tutor  (his 
chief  experience  in  which  art  was  with  Charles  Buller),  he  spent 
no  small  number  of  years,  doing  also  some  hack-work  in  the  way 
of  translating,  writing  for  Brewster's  Encyclopedia^  and  contribut- 
ing to  the  London  Magazine,  that  short-lived  but  fertile  nurse  of 
genius.  The  most  remarkable  of  these  productions  was  the 
Life  of  Schiller,  which  was  published  as  a  volume  in  1825,  his 
thirtieth  year,  at  which  time  he  was  a  resident  in  London  and 
a  frequenter — a  not  too  amiable  one — of  Coleridge's  circle  at 
Highgate  and  of  other  literary  places. 

The  most  important  event  in  his  life  took  place  in  1826,  when 
he  married  Miss  Jane  Welsh,  a  young  lady  who  traced  her  descent 
to  John  Knox,  who  had  some  property,  who  had  a  genius  of  her 
own,  and  who  was  all  the  more  determined  to  marry  a  man  of 
genius.  She  had  hesitated  between  Irving  and  Carlyle,  and,  what- 
ever came  of  it,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  she  was  right  in  prefer- 
ring the  somewhat  uncouth  and  extremely  undeveloped  tutor  who 
had  taught  her  several  things,  —  whether  love  in  the  proper 
sense  was  among  them  or  not  will  always  be  a  moot  point. 
The  Edinburgh  Review  was  kind  to  Carlyle  after  its  fashion,  and 
he  wrote  for  it ;  but  Jeffrey,  though  very  well  disposed  both  to 
Carlyle  and  to  his  wife,  could  not  endure  the  changes  which  soon 
came  on  his  style,  and  might  have  addressed  the  celebrated 
query  which,  as  mentioned,  just  at  the  same  time  he  addressed 
in  delighted  surprise  to  Macaulay,  "Where  did  you  get  that 
style,"  to  Carlyle  in  the  identical  words  but  with  a  very  different 
meaning.  Even  had  it  been  different,  it  was  impossible  that 
Carlyle  should  serve  anywhere  or  any  one ;  and  his  mind,  not  an 
early  ripening  one,  was  even  yet,  at  the  age  of  thirty-two,  in  a 
very  unorganised  condition.  He  resolved  to  retire  to  his  wife's 
farm  of  Craigenputtock  in  Nithsdale ;  and  Mrs.  Carlyle  had  the 
almost  unparalleled  heroism  to  consent  to  this.  For  it  must  be 
remembered  that  her  husband,  with  the  exception  of  the  revenue 


234  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 


of  a  few  essays,  was  living  on  her  means,  that  he  undertook  no 
professional  duties,  and  that  in  the  farmhouse  she  had  to  perform 
those  of  a  servant  as  well  as  those  of  a  wife.  Whatever  other 
opinions  may  be  passed  on  this  episode  of  Carlyle's  life,  which 
lasted  from  1828  to  1834,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  "made" 
him.  He  did  much  positive  work  there,  including  all  his  best  purely 
literary  essays.  There  he  wrote  Sartor  Resarlus,  his  manifesto 
and  proclamation,  a  wild  book  which,  to  its  eternal  honour,  Frasers 
Magazine  accepted,  probably  under  the  influence  of  Lockhart, 
and  which  has  always  been  regarded  by  Carlylians  as  containing 
the  quintessence  of  its  author's  genius.  There  too  was  written 
great  part  of  the  earlier  form  of  the  French  Revolution.  But  the 
greatest  thing  that  he  did  at  Craigenputtock  was  the  thorough 
fermentation,  clearing,  and  settling  of  himself.  When  he  went 
there,  at  nearly  thirty-three,  it  was  more  uncertain  what  would 
come  of  him  than  it  is  in  the  case  of  many  a  man  when  he  leaves 
the  University  at  three-and-twenty.  When  he  left  it,  at  close  on 
his  fortieth  year,  the  drama  of  his  literary  life  was  complete, 
though  only  a  few  lines  of  it  were  written. 

That  drama  lasted  in  actual  time  for  forty-seven  years  longer ; 
and  for  more  than  the  first  thirty  of  them  fresh  and  ever  fresh 
acts  and  scenes  carried  it  on.  For  the  public  his  place  was  taken 
once  and  for  all  by  the  History  of  the  French  Revolution, 
which,  after  alarming  vicissitudes  (John  Stuart  Mill  having 
borrowed  the  first  volume  in  MS.  and  lent  it  to  a  lady,  to  be 
destroyed  by  her  housemaid),  appeared  in  1837.  From  at  least 
that  time  Mrs.  Carlyle's  aspiration  was  fulfilled.  There  were  gain- 
sayers  of  course, — it  may  almost  be  said  that  genius  which  is  not 
gainsaid  is  not  genius, — there  were  furious  decriers  of  style,  temper, 
and  so  forth.  But  nine  out  of  every  ten  men,  at  least,  whose 
opinion  was  worth  taking  knew  that  a  new  star  of  the  first  magnitude 
had  been  added  to  English  literature,  however  much  they  might 
think  its  rays  in  some  respects  baleful. 

Lecturing,  after  the  example  set  chiefly  by  Coleridge  and 
Hazlitt,  was  at  this  time  a  favourite  resource  for  those  men  of 


v  CARLYLE  235 

letters  whose  line  of  composition  was  not  of  the  gainfulest ;  and 
Carlyle  delivered  several  courses,  some  of  which  are  unreported, 
while  others  survive  only  in  inadequate  shapes.  But  Heroes  and 
Hero -Worship  was  at  first  delivered  orally,  though  it  was  not 
printed  till  1841  ;  and  about  the  same  time,  or  rather  earlier, 
appeared  the  Miscellaneous  Essays — a  collection  of  his  work  at  its 
freshest,  least  mannered,  most  varied,  and  in  some  respects  best. 
Chartism  (1839)  and  Past  and  Present  (1843)  reflected  the 
political  problems  oT the  time  and  Carlyle's  interest  in  them.  But 
it  was  not  till  1845  that  a  second,  in  the  ordinary  sense,  great  work, 
Oliver  Cromwell's  Letters  and  Speeches,  was  published.  Five  years 
passed  without  anything  substantive  from  him,  but  in  1850  ap- 
peared Latter-Day  Pamphlets,  the  most  brilliantly  satiric,  and  in 
1851  the  softest,  most  finished,  and  (save  theologically)  least  de- 
batable of  all  his  books,  the  exquisite  biography  in  miniature 
called  the  Life  of  Sterling.  Then  he  engaged,  it  is  difficult  to 
say  whether  by  ill-luck  or  not,  on  the  last  and  largest  of  his 
great  single  undertakings,  the  History  of  Frederick  the  Great. 
Fourteen  years  were  passed,  as  a  matter  of  composition,  in  "  the 
valley  of  the  shadow  of  Frederick,"  as  his  wife  put  it :  half  the 
time  (from  1858  to  1865)  saw  the  actual  publication.  Shortly 
after  the  completion  of  this  Carlyle  visited  Edinburgh  to  receive 
the  Lord  Rectorship  of  his  University,  and  before  long  his  wife 
died.  He  survived  her  fifteen  years,  but  did  nothing  more  of 
great  importance;  indeed,  he  was  seventy-one  when  this  loss 
happened.  Some  short  things  on  "John  Knox,"  on  "The  Early 
Kings  of  Norway,"  and  a  famous  letter  on  "  Shooting  Niagara  " 
(the  Reform  Bill  of  1867),  with  a  few  more,  appeared;  but  he  was 
chiefly  occupied  (as  far  as  he  was  occupied  at  all)  in  writing 
reminiscences,  and  arranging  memorials  of  Mrs.  Carlyle.  The 
publication  of  these  books  after  his  death  by  the  late  Mr.  Froude 
led  to  a  violent  conflict  of  opinion  both  as  to  the  propriety  of  the 
publication  arid  as  to  the  character  of  Carlyle  himself. 

This   conflict   fortunately  concerns  us   but    little   here.      It   is 
certain  that  Carlyle — springing  from  the  lower  ranks  of  society. 


236  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

educated  excellently  as  far  as  the  intellect  was  concerned,  but 
without  attention  to  such  trifles  as  the  habit  (which  his  future  wife 
early  remarked  in  him)  of  putting  bread  and  butter  in  his  tea,  a 
martyr  from  very  early  years  to  dyspepsia,  fostering  a  retiring 
spirit  and  not  too  social  temper,  thoroughly  convinced  that  the 
times  were  out  of  joint  and  not  at  all  thoroughly  convinced  that 
he  or  any  one  could  set  them  right,  finally  possessed  of  an  in- 
tensely religious  nature  which  by  accident  or  waywardness  had 
somehow  thrown  itself  out  of  gear  with  religion — was  not  a  happy 
man  himself  nor  likely  to  make  any  one  else  happy  who  lived  with 
him.  But  it  is  certain  also  that  both  in  respect  to  his  wife  and 
to  those  men,  famous  or  not  famous,  of  whom  he  has  left  too 
often  unkindly  record,  his  bark  was  much  worse  than  his  bite. 
And  it  is  further  certain  that  Mrs.  Carlyle  was  no  down-trodden 
drudge,  but  a  woman  of  brains  almost  as  alert  as  her  husband's 
and  a  tongue  almost  as  sharp  as  his,  who  had  deliberately  made 
her  election  of  the  vocation  of  being  "  wife  to  a  man  of  genius," 
and  who  received  what  she  had  bargained  for  to  the  uttermost 
farthing.  There  will  always  be  those  who  will  think  that  Mr. 
Froude,  doubtless  with  the  best  intentions,  made  a  very  great 
mistake  ;  that,  at  any  rate  for  many  years  after  Carlyle's  death,  only 
a  strictly  genuine  but  judicious  selection  of  the  Reminiscences 
and  Memorials  should  have  been  published,  or  else  that  the 
whole  should  have  been  worked  into  a  real  biography  in  which 
the  comment  and  setting  could  have  given  the  relief  that  the  text 
required.  But  already,  after  more  than  the  due  voices,  there  is 
some  peace  on  the  subject ;  and  a  temporary  wave  of  neglect, 
partly  occasioned  by  this  very  controversy,  was  to  be  expected. 

That  this  wave  will  pass  may  be  asserted  with  a  fulness  and 
calmness  of  assurance  not  to  be  surpassed  in  any  similar  case 
Carlyle's  influence  during  a  great  part  of  the  second  and  the 
whole  of  the  third  quarter  of  this  century  was  so  enormous,  his 
life  was  so  prolonged,  and  the  general  tone  of  public  thought  and 
public  policy  which  has  prevailed  since  some  time  before  his 
death  has  been  so  adverse  to  his  temper,  that  the  reaction  which 


V  CARLYLE  237 

is  all  but  inevitable  in  all  cases  was  certain  to  be  severe  in  his. 
And  if  this  were  a  history  of  thought  instead  of  being  a  history  ol 
the  verbal  expression  of  thought,  it  would  be  possible  and 
interesting  to  explain  this  reaction,  and  to  forecast  the  certain 
rebound  from  it.  As  it  is,  however,  we  have  to  do  with  Carlyle  as 
a  man  of  letters  only ;  and  if  his  position  as  the  greatest  English 
man  of  letters  of  the  century  in  prose  be  disputed,  it  will  gener- 
ally be  found  that  the  opposition  is  due  to  some  not  strictly 
literary  cause,  while  it  is  certain  that  any  competitor  who  is  set 
up  can  be  dislodged  by  a  fervent  and  well-equipped  Carlylian 
without  very  much  difficulty. 

He  has  been  classed  here  as  a  historian,  and  though  the  bulk 
of  his  work  is  very  great  and  its  apparent  variety  considerable,  it 
will  be  found  that  history  and  her  sister  biography,  even  when  his 
subjects  bore  an  appearance  of  difference,  always  in  reality 
engaged  his  attention.  His  three  greatest  books,  containing  more 
than  half  his  work  in  bulk, — The  French  Revolution,  the  Cromwell, 
and  the  Frederick, — are  all  openly  and  avowedly  historical.  The 
Schiller  and  the  Sterling  are  biographies ;  the  Sartor  Resartus 
a  fantastic  autobiography.  Nearly  all  the  Essays,  even  those 
which  are  most  literary  in  subject — all  the  Lectures  on  Heroes,  the 
greater  part  of  Past  and  Present,  The  Early  Kings  of  Norway, 
the  John  Knox,  are  more  or  less  plainly  and  strictly  historical  or 
biographical.  Even  Chartism,  the  non-antique  part  of  Past  and 
Present,  and  the  Latter-Day  Pamphlets,  deal  with  politics  in  the 
sense  in  which  politics  are  the  principal  agent  in  making  history, 
regard  them  constantly  and  almost  solely  in  their  actual  or 
probable  effect  on  the  life-story  of  the  nation,  and  to  no  small 
extent  of  its  individual  members.  Out  of  the  historic  relation  of 
nation  or  individual  Carlyle  would  very  rarely  attempt  to  place, 
and  hardly  ever  succeeded  in  placing,  any  thing  or  person.  He 
could  not  in  the  least  judge  literature — of  which  he  was  so  great 
a  practitioner  always,  and  sometimes  so  great  a  judge — from  the 
point  of  view  of  form  :  he  would  have  scorned  to  do  so,  and  did 
scorn  those  who  did  so.  His  deficiencies  in  abstract  philosophy, 


238  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

whether  political,  theological,  metaphysical,  or  other,  arise  directly 
from  this — that  he  could  never  contemplate  any  of  these  things 
as  abstract,  but  only  in  the  common  conduct  of  men  towards 
their  fellows,  towards  themselves,  and  towards  God.  For  Carlyle 
never  "  forgot  God,"  though  he  might  speak  unadvisedly  with  his 
lips  of  other  men's  ways  of  remembering  Him.  The  "  human 
document,"  as  later  slang  has  it,  was  in  effect  the  only  thing  that 
interested  him  ;  and  he  was  content  to  employ  it  in  constructing 
human  history.  More  than  once  he  put  his  idea  of  this  history 
formally  under  a  formal  title.  But  his  entire  work  is  a  much 
better  exposition  of  that  idea  than  these  particular  essays ;  and  it 
is  not  easy  to  open  any  page  of  it  in  which  the  idea  itself  is  not 
vividly  illustrated  and  enforced  upon  the  reader. 

But  once  more,  this  is  no  place  for  even  a  summary,  much  less 
for  a  discussion,  of  the  much  discussed  Carlylian  "  Gospel  of 
Work";  of  its  apostle's  less  vague,  but  also  less  disputable,  condem- 
nations of  shams  and  cants  ;  or  of  the  innumerable  applications 
and  uses  to  which  he  put  these  doctrines.  The  important  thing 
for  our  purpose  is  that  these  applications  took  form  in  thirty 
volumes  of  the  most  brilliant,  the  most  stimulating,  the  most 
varied,  the  most  original  work  in  English  literature.  The  titles 
of  this  work  have  been  given  ;  to  give  here  any  notion  of  their 
contents  would  take  the  chapter.  Carlyle  could  be — as  in  the 
Cronnvell,  where  he  sets  himself  and  confines  himself  to  the 
double  task  of  elucidating  his  hero's  rugged  or  crafty  obscurities 
of  speech  and  writing,  and  of  piecing  them  into  a  connected 
history,  or  where  he  wrestles  with  the  huge  accumulation  of 
documents  about  Frederick — as  practical  as  the  driest  of  Dry-as- 
dusts.  But  others  could  equal,  though  few  surpass  him,  in  this. 
Where  he  stands  alone  is  in  a  fantastic  fertility  of  divagation  and 
comment  which  is  as  much  his  own  as  the  clear,  neat  directness  of 
Macaulay  is  his.  Much  of  it  is  due  to  his  gospel,  or  temper,  or 
whatever  it  is  to  be  called,  of  earnest  suasion  to  work  and  scornful 
denunciation  of  cant  ;  something  to  his  wide  reading  and  apt 
faculty  of  illustration ;  but  most  to  his  style. 


V  CARLYLE  239 

In  the  early  days  of  his  unpopularity  this  style  used  to  be 
abused  with  heat  or  dismissed  with  scorn  as  mere  falsetto,  copied 
to  a  great  extent  from  Richter.  It  is  certain  that  in  Carlyle's 
_yery  ^rlipst  ^'^c  there  is  small  trace  of  it,  and  that  he  writes  in 
a  fashion  not  very  startlingly  different  from  that  of  any  well-read 
_and-  well-taught  author  of  his  time.  And  it  is  certain  aTso'iTfaTif 
was  after  his  special  addiction  to  German  studies  that  the  new 
manner  appeared.  Yet  it  is  very  far  indeed  from  being  copied  from 
any  single  model,  or  even  from  any  single  language  ;  and  a_great^ 
deal  that  is  in  it  is  not  German  at  all.  Something  may  even  be  traced 
to  our  own  more  fantastic  writers  in  the  seventeenth  century,  such 
as  Sir  Thomas  Urquhart  in  Scotland  and  Sir  Roger  L'Estrange  in 
England ;  much  to  a  Scottish  fervour  and  quaintness  blending 
itself  with  and  utilising  a  wider  range  of  reading  than  had  been 
usual  with  Scotsmen ;  most  to  the  idiosyncrasy  of  the  individual. 
.  Carlyle's  style  is  not  seldom  spoken  of  as  compact  of  tricks 
and  manners ;  and  no  doubt  these  are  present  in  it.  Yet  a 
narrow  inspection  will  show  that  its  effect  is  by  no  means  due  so 
much  in  reality  as  in  appearance  to  the  retaining  of  capital  letters, 
the  violent  breaches  and  aposiopeses,  the  omission  of  pronouns 
and  colourless  parts  of  speech  generally,  the  coining  of  new 
words,  and  the  introduction  of  unusual  forms.  These  things  are 
often  there,  but  they  are  not  always  ;  and  even  when  they  are 
there  is  something  else  much  more  important,  much  more 
characteristic,  but  also  much  harder  to  put  the  finger  on.  There 
is  in  Carlyle's  fiercer  and  more  serious  passages  a  fiery  glow  of 
enthusiasm  or  indignation,  in  his  lighter  ones  a  quaint  felicity  of 
unexpected  humour,  in  his  expositions  a  vividness,  of  present- 
ment, in  his  arguments  a  sledge-hammer  force,  all  of  which  are 
not  to  be  found  together  anywhere  else,  and  none  of  which  are  to 
be  found  anywhere  in  quite  the  same  form.  And  despite  the 
savagery  both  of  his  indignation  and  his  laughter,  there  is  no 
greater  master  of  tenderness.  Wherever  he  is  at  home,  and  he 
seldom  wanders  far  from  it,  the  weapon  of  Carlyle  is  like  none 
other — -it  is  the  very  sword  of  Goliath. 


240  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

And  this  sword  pierces  to  the  joints  and  marrow  as  no  other 
of  the  second  division  of  our  authors  of  the  nineteenth  century 
proper  pierces,  with  the  exception  of  that  of  Tennyson  in  verse. 
It  is  possible  to  disagree  with  Carlyle  intensely ;  perhaps  it  is  not 
possible  to  agree  with  him  in  any  detailed  manner,  unless  the 
agreer  be  somewhat  destitute  of  individual  taste  and  judgment. 
But  on  his  whole  aspect  and  tendency,  reserving  individual  ex- 
pressions, he  is,  as  few  are,  (greah  The  diathesis  is  there — the 
general  disposition  towards  notte  and  high  things.  The  ex- 
pression is  there — the  capacity  of  putting  what  is  felt  and  meant 
in  a  manner  always  contemptuous  of  mediocrity,  yet  seldom 
disdainful  of  common-sense.  To  speak  on  the  best  things 
in  an  original  way,  in  a  distinguished  style,  is  the  privilege 
of  the  elect  in  literature  ;  and  none  of  those  who  were  born  within, 
or  closely  upon  the  beginning  of  the  century  has  had  these  gifts 
in  English  as  have  the  authors  of  The  Lotos  Eaters  and  Sartor 
Resartus. 

Only  one  other  writer  of  history  during  the  century,  himself 
the  latest  to  die  of  his  generation,  except  Mr.  Rusk  in,  deserves, 
for  the  union  of  historical  and  literary  merit,  to  be  placed,  if  not 
on  a  level  with  Macaulay  and  Carlyle,  yet  not  far  below  them ; 
but  a  not  inconsiderable  number  of  historians  and  biographers  of 
value  who  distinguished  themselves  about  or  since  the  middle  of 
the  century  must  be  chronicled  more  or  less  briefly.  Two  Scottish 
scholars  of  eminence,  both  in  turn  Historiographers  Royal  of 
Scotland,  John  Hill  Burton  and  William  Forbes  Skene,  were 
born  in  the  same  year,  1809.  Burton,  who  died  in  iSSi,  busied 
himself  with  the  history  of  his  country  at  large,  beginning  with 
the  period  since  the  Revolution,  and  tackling  the  earlier  and 
more  distinctively  national  time  afterwards.  He  was  not  a  very 
good  writer,  but  displayed  very  great  industry  and  learning  with 
a  sound  and  impartial  judgment.  Skenc,  on  the  other  hand, 
was  the  greatest  authority  of  his  time  (he  lived  till  1892)  on 
"  Celtic  Scotland,"  which  is  the  title  of  his  principal  book.  In 
the  same  year  (or  in  1808)  was  born  Charles  Mcrivale,  afterwards 


v  MERIVALE — KINGLAKE  241 

Fellow  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge,  and  Dean  of  Ely,  who, 
besides  other  work,  established  himself  in  the  same  class  of 
historians  with  Hallam  and  Milman,  Thirlwall  and  Grote,  by  his 
extensive  History  of  the  Romans  under  the  Empire.  On  the 
whole,  Merivale  (who  died  in  1894)  ranks,  both  for  historical  and 
literary  gifts,  somewhat  below  the  other  members  of  this  remark- 
able group — a  position  which  is  still  a  very  honourable  one. 

Shortly  after  these  three  was  born  Alexander  Kinglake  (1811- 
1891) — a  man  of  very  remarkable  talents,  but  something  of  a 
"  terrible  example  "  in  regard  to  the  practice,  which  has  already 
been  noticed  as  characteristic  of  the  century,  of  devoting  enor- 
mously long  histories  to  special  subjects  and  points.  Kinglake, 
who  was  a  native  of  Somerset,  an  Eton  and  Cambridge  man,  a 
barrister  subsequently,  for  some  years  a  Member  of  Parliament, 
and  a  man  of  independent  means,  first  distinguished  himself  in 
letters  by  the  very  brilliant  and  popular  book  of  travels  in  the 
East  called  Eothcn,  which  was  published  in  1847.  That  there  is 
something  of  manner  and  trick  about  this  is  not  to  be  denied ; 
but  it  must  be  allowed  that  the  trick  and  manner  have  been 
followed,  apparently  with  success,  in  travel-writing  for  about  halt 
a  century,  while  it  cannot  be  fairly  said  that  Kinglake  himself 
had  any  exact  models,  though  he  may  have  owed  something  to 
Beckford  and  a  little  to  Sterne.  It  is  not  very  easy  to  say 
whether  Kinglake's  literary  reputation  would  have  stood  higher  or 
lower  if  he  had  written  nothing  else ;  but  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
before  many  years  were  over,  he  attempted  a  much  more  am- 
bitious task  in  the  History  of  the  Crimean  War,  the  first  two 
volumes  of  which  appeared  in  1863,  though  the  book  was  not 
finished  till  twenty  years  later.  That  this  history  shows  no  small 
literary  faculties  no  competent  judge  can  deny.  The  art  of  word- 
painting — a  dubious  and  dangerous  art — is  pushed  to  almost  its 
furthest  limits ;  the  writer  has  a  wonderful  gift  of  combining  the 
minutest  and  most  numerous  details  into  an  orderly  and  intelligible 
whole  ;  and  the  quality  which  the  French  untranslatably  call  diable 
an  corps,  or,  as  we  more  pedantically  say,  "  daemonic  energy,'"'  is 

R 


242  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 


present  everywhere.  But  the  book  is  monstrously  out  of  pro- 
portion,— a  single  battle  has  something  like  an  entire  volume,  and 
the  events  of  some  two  years  occupy  eight, — and,  clear  as  the 
individual  pictures  are,  the  panorama  is  of  such  endless  length 
that  the  mind's  eye  retains  no  proper  notion  of  it.  In  the  second 
place,  the  style,  though  brilliant,  is  hard  and  brassy,  full  of  points 
that  are  more  suitable  to  the  platform  or  the  newspaper  than  to 
the  historic  page, — not  so  much  polished  as  varnished,  and  after  a 
short  time  intolerably  fatiguing.  In  the  third, — and  this  is  the 
gravest  fault  of  all, — the  author's  private  or  patriotic  likes  or  dislikes 
pervade  the  whole  performance,  and  reduce  too  much  of  it  to  a 
tissue  of  extravagant  advocacy  cr  depreciation,  made  more  dis- 
gusting by  the  repetition  of  catch  phrases  and  pet  labels  somewhat 
after  the  manner  of  Dickens.  Sir  Stratford  Canning,  "  the  great 
Kltchi,"  is  one  of  Kinglake's  divinities,  Lord  Raglan  another; 
and  an  acute  and  energetic,  but  not  quite  heaven-born  diploma- 
tist, a  most  honest,  modest,  and  in  difficult  circumstances  stead- 
fast, if  not  always  judicious  soldier,  become,  the  one  Marlborough 
in  the  council-chamber,  the  other  Marlborough  in  the  field.  On 
the  other  hand,  for  this  or  that  reason,  Mr.  Kinglake  had  taken 
a  violent  dislike  to  the  Emperor  Napoleon  the  Third,  and  affected, 
as  did  some  other  English  Liberals,  to  consider  the  coup  d'etat 
as  not  merely  a  dubious  piece  of  statecraft,  but  a  hideous  and 
abominable  crime.  Consequently,  he  abused  all  those  who  took 
part  in  it  with  tedious  virulence,  which  has  probably  made  not  a 
few  Englishmen  look  on  them  with  much  more  leniency  than 
they  deserved.  In  short,  Kinglake,  with  many  of  the  qualities  of 
the  craftsman  in  an  extraordinary  degree,  was  almost  entirely 
deficient  in  those  of  the  artist.  He  served  as  a  favourite  example 
to  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold  of  the  deficiency  of  the  British  literary 
temper  in  accomplishment  and  grace,  and  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  Mr.  Arnold's  strictures  were  here  justified  to  an  extent  which 
was  not  always  the  case  when  he  assumed  the  office  of  censor. 

John  Forster,  who  was  born   a  year  later  than   Kinglake,  and 
died  fifteen  years  before  him,  was  an  industrious  writer  of  bio 


FORSTER — BUCKLE  243 


graphics  and  biographical  history,  the  friend  of  a  good  many 
men  of  letters,  editor  for  many  years  of  the  Examiner,  and  secre- 
tary to  the  Lunacy  Commissioners.  He  paid  particular  attention 
to  the  period  of  the  Rebellion ;  his  Arrest  of  the  Five  Members 
being  his  chief  work,  among  several  devoted  to  it.  He  wrote  a 
Life  of  Goldsmith,  and  began  one  of  Swift.  In  contemporary 
biography  his  chief  performances  were  lives  of  Landor  and  of 
Dickens,  with  both  of  whom  he  was  extremely  intimate.  In 
private  life  Forster  had  the  character  of  a  bumptious  busybody, 
which  character  indeed  the  two  books  just  mentioned,  even 
without  the  anecdotes  abundant  in  more  recent  books  of  bio- 
graphy, abundantly  establish.  And  towards  the  men  of  letters 
with  whom  he  was  intimate  (Carlyle  and  Browning  may  be  added 
to  Landor  and  Dickens)  he  seems  to  have  behaved  like  a  Boswell- 
Podsnap,  while  in  the  latter  half  of  the  character  he  no  doubt  sat 
to  Dickens  himself.  But  he  was  an  indefatigable  literary  inquirer, 
and  seems,  in  a  patronising  kind  of  way,  to  have  been  liberal 
enough  of  the  result  of  his  inquiries.  He  had  a  real  interest 
both  in  history  and  literature,  and  he  wrote  fairly  enough. 

One  of  the  most  curious  figures  among  the  historians  of  this 
century  was  Henry  Thomas  Buckle,  who  was  born  near  Black- 
heath  in  1823,  and  privately  educated.  He  had  ample  means, 
and  was  fond  of  books;  and  in  1857  he  brought  out  the  first 
volume  (which  was  followed  by  a  second  in  1861)  of  a  History  of 
Civilisation.  He  did  not  nearly  complete — in  fact  he  only  began — 
his  scheme,  in  which  the  European  part  was  ultimately  intended 
to  be  subordinate  to  the  English,  and  he  died  of  typhus  at 
Damascus  in  May  1862.  The  book  attained  at  once,  and  for 
some  time  kept,  an  extraordinary  popularity,  which  has  been 
succeeded  by  a  rather  unjust  depreciation.  Both  are  to  be 
accounted  for  by  the  fact  that  it  is  in  many  ways  a  book  rather 
of  the  French  than  of  the  English  type,  and  displays  in  fuller 
measure  than  almost  any  of  Buckle's  contemporaries  in  France 
itself,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Taine,  could  boast,  the  frank 
and  fearless,  some  would  say  the  headlong  and  headstrong,  habit 


244  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 

of  generalisation — scorning  particulars,  or  merely  impressing  into 
service  such  as  are  useful  to  it  and  drumming  the  others  out — 
on  which  Frenchmen  pride  themselves,  and  for  the  lack  of  which 
they  are  apt  to  pronounce  English  historians,  and  indeed  English 
men  of  letters  of  all  kinds,  plodding  and  unilluminated  craftsmen 
rather  than  artists.  In  Buckle's  reflections  on  Spain  and  Scotland, 
he  accounts  for  the  whole  history  of  both  countries  and  the  whole 
character  of  both  peoples  by  local  conditions  in  the  first  place, 
and  by  forms  of  civil  and  ecclesiastical  government.  In  respect 
to  these  last  his  views  were  crude  Voltairianism  ;  but  perhaps  this 
is  the  best  and  most  characteristic  example  of  his  method.  He 
was  extremely  prejudiced  ;  his  lack  of  solid  disciplinary  education 
made  him  unapt  to  understand  the  true  force  and  relative  value 
of  his  facts  and  arguments  ;  and  as  his  premisses  are  for  the  most 
part  capriciously  selected  facts  cemented  together  with  an  un- 
tempered  mortar  of  theory,  his  actual  conclusions  are  rarely  of 
much  value.  But  his  style  is  clear  and  vigorous ;  the  aggressive 
raiding  character  of  his  argument  is  agreeably  stimulating,  and 
excellent  to  make  his  readers  clear  up  their  minds  on  the  other 
side ;  while  the  dread  of  over-generalisation,  however  healthy  in 
itself,  has  been  so  long  a  dominant  force  in  English  letters  and 
philosophy  that  a  little  excess  the  other  way  might  be  decidedly 
useful  as  an  alterative.  The  worst  fault  of  Buckle  was  the 
Voltairianism  above  referred  to,  causing  or  caused  by,  as  is 
always  the  case,  a  deplorable  lack  of  taste,  which  is  not  con- 
fined to  religious  matters. 

Edward  Augustus  Freeman,  who  was  a  little  younger  than 
Buckle  and  survived  him  for  thirty  years,  had  some  points  in 
common  with  the  historian  of  civilisation,  though  his  education, 
interests,  and  tone  in  reference  to  religion  were  wholly  different. 
Mr.  Freeman,  who  was  not  at  any  public  school,  but  was  a  Fellow 
of  Trinity  College,  Oxford,  very  soon  devoted  himself  to  the 
study  of  early  English  history,  and  secured  a  durable  position  by 
his  elaborate  Historv  of  the  Xonnan  Conquest  (1867-76),  which, 
even  though  the  largest  and  most  important,  was  only  one  among 


FREEMAN— GREEN  245 


scores  of  works,  ending  in  an  unfinished  History  of  Sicily.  He 
was,  when  he  died  in  1892,  Regius  Professor  of  Modern  History 
at  Oxford,  and  he  had  for  many  years  been  very  influential  in 
determining  the  course  of  historical  study.  He  was  also,  for 
many  years  of  his  life,  an  active  journalist,  being  especially  known 
as  a  contributor  to  the  Saturday  Review,  and  he  sometimes  took 
a  very  busy  part  in  politics.  Mr.  Freeman  was  a  student  of  un- 
tiring energy,  and  will  always  deserve  honourable  memory  as  the 
first  historian  who  recognised  and  utilised  the  value  of  architecture 
in  supplying  historical  documents  and  illustrations.  His  style  was 
at  times  picturesque  but  too  diffuse,  and  disfigured  by  a  habit  of 
allusion  as  teasing  as  Macaulay's  antithesis  or  Kinglake's  stock 
phrases.  That  he  was  apt  to  pronounce  very  strong  opinions  on 
almost  any  question  with  which  he  dealt,  was  perhaps  a  less  draw- 
back to  his  excellence  as  a  historian  than  the  violently  contro- 
versial tone  in  which  he  was  wont  to  deal  with  those  who  happened 
to  hold  opinions  different  from  his  own.  Putting  defects  of 
manner  aside,  there  is  no  question  that,  for  his  own  special  period 
of  English  history  (the  eleventh  and  twelfth  centuries),  Mr. 
Freeman  did  more  than  any  man  had  done  before  him,  and  as 
much  as  any  man  has  done  for  any  other  period  ;  while  in  relation 
to  his  further  subjects  of  study,  his  work,  though  less  trustworthy, 
is  full  of  stimulus  and  of  information. 

His  chief  pupil,  John  Richard  Green,  who  was  born  in  1837 
and  died  of  consumption  in  1883,  was  a  native  of  Oxford,  and 
was  educated  there  at  Magdalen  College  School  and  Jesus 
College.  Mr  Green,  like  Mr.  Freeman,  was  a  frequent  contri- 
butor to  the  Saturday  Review,  and  did  some  clerical  duty  in  the 
east  of  London ;  but  he  is  best  known  by  his  historical  work  on 
English  subjects,  especially  the  famous  Short  History  of  the  English 
People,  perhaps  the  most  popular  work  of  its  class  and  kind  ever 
written.  Mr.  Green  professed,  on  a  principle  which  had  been 
growing  in  favour  for  some  time,  to  extend  the  usual  conception 
of  historical  dealing  to  social,  literary,  and  other  matters.  These, 
however,  had  never  as  a  fact  been  overlooked  by  historians,  and  the 


246  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAP. 


popularity  of  the  book  was  chiefly  due  to  its  judicious  selection 
of  interesting  facts,  to  the  spirit  of  the  narrative,  and  to  the  style, 
based  partly  on  Macaulay,  but  infused  with  a  modernness  which 
exactly  hit  the  taste  of  the  readers  of  our  time.  Mr.  Green  after- 
wards expanded  this  book  somewhat ;  and  his  early  death  cut 
short  a  series  of  more  extended  monographs,  The  Making  of 
England,  The  Conquest  of  England,  etc.,  which  would  have 
enabled  him  to  display  the  minute  knowledge  on  which  his  more 
summary  treatment  of  the  general  theme  had  been  based. 

Among  historians  to  whom  in  larger  space  more  extended 
notice  than  is  here  possible  would  have  to  be  given,  perhaps  the 
first  place  is  due  to  Philip  Henry,  sixth  Earl  Stanhope  (1805-75), 
who  (chiefly  under  the  title  of  Lord  Mahon,  which  he  bore  before 
his  succession  to  the  earldom  in  1855)  was  an  active  historical 
writer  of  great  diligence  and  impartiality,  and  possessed  of  a  fair 
though  not  very  distinguished  style.  The  first  notable  work — 
a  History  of  the  War  of  the  Succession  in  Spain  (1832) — of  Lord 
Stanhope  (who  was  an  Oxford  man,  took  some  part  in  politics, 
and  was  a  devoted  Peelite)  was  reviewed  by  Macaulay,  and  he 
wrote  later  several  other  and  minor  historical  books.  But  his 
reputation  rests  on  his  History  of  Europe  from  the  Peace  of  Utrecht 
to  the  Peace  of  Versailles,  which  occupied  him  for  some  twenty 
years,  finishing  in  1854.  Very  much  less  known  to  the  general, 
but  of  singular  ability,  was  William  Johnson  or  Cory,  who  under 
the  earlier  name  had  attracted  considerable  public  attention  as 
an  Eton  master  and  as  author  of  a  small  but  remarkable  volume 
of  poems  called  lonica.  After  his  retirement  from  Eton  and  the 
change  of  his  name,  Mr.  Cory  amused  himself  with  the  composi- 
tion of  a  History  of  England,  or  rather  a  long  essay  thereon, 
which  was  very  little  read  and  falls  completely  out  of  the  ordinary 
conception  of  such  a  book,  but  is  distinguished  by  an  exceptionally 
good  and  scholarly  style,  as  well  as  by  views  and  expressions  of 
great  originality.  Many  others  must  pass  wholly  unnoticed  that 
we  may  finish  this  chapter  with  one  capital  name. 

One   of  the  greatest   historians   of  the    century,   except  foi 


v  FROUDE  247 

one  curious,  and  -unfortunate  defect,  and  (without  any  drawback) 
one  of  the  greatest  writers  of  English  prose  during  that  century 
wtfr~James<  Anthony  ^roud\  who  was  born  at  Dartington  near 
Totnes  m  1818",  on  23rd  April  (Shakespeare's  birthday  and  St. 
George's  Day),  and  died  in  1894  at  the  Molt  near  Salcombe  in  his 
native  county.  Mr.  Froude  (the  youngest  son  of  the  Archdeacon 
of  Totnes  and  the  brother  of  Richard  Hurrell  Froude,  who*'" 
played  so  remarkaBIe  a  part  in  the  Oxford  Movement,  and  of 
William  Froude  the  distinguished  naval  engineer)  was  a  West- 
minster boy,  and  went  to  Oriel  College,  Oxford,  afterwards 

obtaining  a  Fellowship  at  Exeter.      Like  ms  elder  brother  he 

engaged  in  tfce^Tractarian  Moveinentpand  was  specially  under  the 
influence  of  Newmart^taking  orders  in  1844.  The  great  con- 
vulsion, however,  of  Newman's  secession  sent  him,  not  as  it  sent 
some  with  Newman,  but  like  Mark  Pattison  and  a  few  more,  into 
^scepj^cjjshv IT^not  exactly  negation,  on  all  religious  matters.  He 
put  his  change  of  opinions  (he  had  previously  written  under  the 
pseudonym  of  "Zeta"  a  novel  called  Shadows  of  the  Clouds}  into 
a  book  entitled  The  Nemesis  of  Faith,  published  in  1849,  resigned 
his  Fellowship,  gave  up  or  lost  (to  his  great  good  fortune)  a  post 
which  had  been  offered  him  in  Tasmania,  and  betook  himself  to 
literature,  being  very  much,  except  in  point  of  style,  under  the  influ- 
ence of  Carlyle.  He  wrote  for  Eraser,  the  Westminster,  and  other 
periodicals ;  but  was  not  content  with  fugitive  compositions,  and 
soon  planned  a  History  of  England  from  the  Fall  of  IVolsey  to  the 
defeat  of  the  Armada.  The  first  volumes  of  this  appeared  in 
1856,  and  it  was  finished  in  1869.  Meanwhile  Froude  from  time 
to  time  collected  his  essays  into  volumes  called  Short  Studies, 
which  contain  some  of  his  very  best  writing.  His  next  large 
work  was  The  English  in  Ireland,  which  was  published  in  three 
volumes  (1871-1874).  In  1874-1875  Lord  Carnarvon  sent  him 
on  Government  missions  to  the  Cape,  an  importation  of  a  French 
practice  into  England  which  was  not  very  well  justified  by  the 
particular  instance.  Between  1881  and  1884  he  was  occupied  as 
Carlyle's  literary  executor  in  issuing  his  biographical  remains. 


248  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY 


Later  Oceana  and  The  English  in  the  West  Indies  contained  at 
once  sketches  of  travel  and  political  reflections;  and  in  1889  he 
published  an  Irish  historical  romance,  The  Two  Chiefs  of  Dunboy. 
He  was  made  Regius  Professor  of  Modern  History  at  Oxford  in 
succession  to  Mr.  Freeman,  and  his  two  latest  works,  Erasmus^ 
published  just  before,  and  English  Seamen  some  months  after  his 
death,  contain  in  part  the  results  of  the  appointment. 

It  is  a  vulgar  observation  that  the  natural  element  of  some 
men  appears  to  be  hot  water.  No  English  author  of  the  century 
justifies  this  better  than  Mr.  Froude.  His  early  change  of  faith 
attracted  to  him  a  very  considerable  share  of  the  obloquy  which 
usually  (and  perhaps  not  so  unreasonably  as  is  sometimes  thought) 
attaches  to  violent  revolutions  of  opinion  on  important  points. 
His  History  was  no  sooner  published  than  most  acrimonious 
attacks  were  made  upon  it,  and  continued  for  many  years,  by  a 
school  of  historical  students  with  the  late  Mr.  Freeman  at  their 
head.  His  Irish  book,  coinciding  with  the  rise  of  "  Home  Rule  " 
sentiment  in  Ireland,  brought  upon  him  furious  enmity  from  the 
Irish  Nationalist  party  and  from  those  who,  at  first  or  by  and  by, 
sympathised  with  them  in  England.  His  colonial  visits  and 
criticisms  not  merely  attracted  to  him  the  animosity  of  all  those 
Englishmen  who  espoused  the  politics  of  non-intervention  and 
non-aggrandisement,  but  aroused  lively  irritation  in  the  Colonies 
themselves.  About  his  discharge  of  his  duties  as  Carlyle's 
executor  a  perfect  tempest  of  indignation  arose,  it  being  alleged 
that  he  had  either  carelessly,  or  through  bad  taste,  or  with 
deliberate  treachery,  revealed  his  dead  friend  and  master's  weak- 
nesses and  domestic  troubles  to  the  public  view. 

With  some  of  the  causes  of  this  odium  we  are  fortunately  here 
dispensed  from  dealing.  Theological  and  political  matters,  in  so 
far  as  they  are  controversial,  are  altogether  outside  of  our  scope. 
The  question  of  the  dealing  with  Carlyle's  "  Remains"  is  one  rather 
of  ethics  than  of  literature  proper,  and  it  is  perhaps  sufficient  to 
make,  in  reference  to  it,  the  warning  observation  that  Lockhart, 
who  is  now  considered  by  almost  all  competent  critics  as  a  very 


v  FROUDE  249 

pattern  of  the  union  of  fidelity  and  good  taste  towards  both  his 
subject  and  his  readers,  was  accused,  at  the  appearance  of  his 
book,  of  treachery  towards  Scott. 

But  it  must  be  confessed  that  if  Mr.  Froude's  critics  were 
unfair  (and  they  certainly  were)  he  himself  gave  only  too  abundant 
opening  to  fair  criticism.  That  his  first  great  book  (not  perhaps 
any  of  his  others)  was  planned  on  an  unduly  large  scale,  and 
indulged  in  far  too  extensive  dissertation,  divagation,  and  so 
forth,  was  rather  the  fault  of  his  time  than  of  himself.  Grote  and 
Macaulay  had  obtained,  the  first  considerable,  the  latter  immense 
popularity  by  similar  prolixity ;  and  Carlyle  was  about,  in  the 
Frederick,  to  follow  the  fashion.  But  whereas  all  these  three, 
according  to  the  information  open  to  them,  were  and  are  among 
the  most  painfully  laborious  researchers  and,  with  a  fair  allowance, 
the  most  faithful  recorders  among  historians,  Mr.  Froude  dis- 
played an  attention  to  accuracy  which  his  warmest  admirers  must 
allow  to  be  sadly,  and  which  enemies  asserted  to  be  scandalously 
insufficient.  He  has  been  called  by  well-affected  critics  "  con- 
genitally  inaccurate,"  and  there  is  warrant  for  it.  Nor  did  any 
one  of  his  three  great  models  come  short  of  him  in  partiality,  in 
advocacy,  in  the  determination  to  make  the  reader  accept  his  own 
view  first  of  all. 

He  was,  in  the  earlier  part  of  his  career  at  any  rate,  a  very 
poor  man,  whereas  Macaulay  was  in  easy,  and  Grote  in  affluent 
circumstances,  and  he  had  not  Carlyle's  Scotch  thrift.  But  the 
carelessness  of  his  dealing  with  documents  had  more  in  it  than 
lack  of  pence  to  purchase  assistance,  or  even  than  lack  of 
dogged  resolve  to  do  the  drudgery  himself.  His  enemies  of 
course  asserted,  or  hinted,  that  the  added  cause  was  dishonesty 
at  the  worst,  indifference  to  truth  at  the  best.  As  far  as  dis- 
honesty goes  they  may  be  summarily  non-suited.  The  present 
writer  once  detected,  in  a  preface  of  Mr.  Froude's  to  a  book 
with  which  the  introducer  was  thoroughly  in  sympathy,  repeated 
errors  of  quotation  or  allusion  which  actually  weakened  Mr. 
Froude's  own  argument — cases  where  he  made  his  own  case 


25u  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY  CHAI-. 

worse  by  miscitation.  To  the  very  last,  in  his  Erasmus  itself, 
which  he  had  prepared  at  some  pains  for  the  press,  his  work 
would  always  abound  in  the  most  astonishing  slips  of  memory, 
oversights  of  fact,  hastinesses  of  statement.  There  is  probably 
no  historian  of  anything  like  his  calibre  in  the  whole  history 
of  literature  who  is  so  dangerous  to  trust  for  mere  matters  of 
fact,  who  gives  such  bad  books  of  reference,  who  is  so  little  to 
be  read  with  implicit  confidence  in  detail.  Had  his  critics 
confined  themselves  to  pointing  this  out,  and  done  him  justice 
in  his  other  and  real  merits,  little  fault  could  have  been  found 
with  them.  But  it  is  impossible  not  to  see  that  these  merits 
were,  at  least  in  some  cases,  part  of  his  crime  in  the  eyes  of  those 
who  did  not  like  him  ;  in  others  were  of  a  kind  which  their 
natural  abilities  did  not  qualify  them  to  detect. 

The  first  of  these  merits — the  least  it  may  be  in  some  eyes,  not 
so  in  others, — was  a  steadfast,  intense,  fiery  patriotism,  which  may 
remind  us  of  that  which  Macaulay  in  a  famous  passage  has 
ascribed  to  Chatham  in  modern  times  and  to  Demosthenes  of 
old.  This  quality  differed  as  much  from  the  flowery  and  conven- 
tional rhetoric  not  uncommon  in  writers  of  some  foreign  nations, 
as  from  the  smug  self-satisfaction  which  was  so  frequent  in 
English  speakers  and  authors  of  his  own  earlier  time.  No  one, 
probably,  of  Mr.  Froude's  day  was  less  blind  to  English  faults 
than  he  was ;  no  one  more  thoroughly  grasped  and  more  ardently 
admired  the  greatness  of  England,  or  more  steadfastly  did  his 
utmost  in  his  own  vocation  to  keep  her  great. 

His  second  excellence — an  excellence  still  contested  and  in  a 
way  contestable,  but  less  subject  than  the  first  to  personal  and 
particular  opinion — was  his  command  of  the  historic  grasp,  his 
share  of  the  historic  sense.  I  have  seen  these  terms  referred  to 
as  if  they  were  chatter  or  claptrap  ;  while  the  qualities  which  they 
denote  are  very  often  confounded  with  qualities  which,  sometimes 
found  in  connection  with  them,  may  exist  without  either.  The 
historic  sense  may  be  roughly  described  as  the  power  of  seizing, 
and  so  of  portraying,  a  historic  character,  incident,  or  period  as  if 


V  FROUDE  251 

it  were  alive,  not  dead,  in  such  a  manner  that  the  fit  reader, 
whether  he  is  convinced  or  not  that  the  things  ever  did  happen, 
sees  that  they  might  and  probably  must  have  happened.  Some 
of  the  most  estimable  and  excellent  of  historians  have  not  had 
even  a  glimmering  of  this  sense :  they  have  at  best  laboriously 
assembled  the  materials  out  of  which,  sooner  or  later,  some  one 
with  the  sense  will  make  a  live  "history.  But  Thucydides  and 
Herodotus  had  it ;  Tacitus  had  it,  and  even  Sallust ;  it  betrays 
itself  in  the  most  artless  fashion  in  Villehardouin  and  Joinville, 
less  artlessly  in  Comines ;  Clarendon  had  it ;  Gibbon  had  it ; 
Carlyle  had  it  as  none  has  had  it  before  or  since  ;  and  Mr.  Froude 
had  it,  not  much  less  though  more  fitfully  than  Carlyle.  It  is 
not  in  the  least  necessary  to  agree  with  his  views ;  it  is  possible 
to  regard  his  facts  with  the  most  anxious  suspicion.  You  may 
think  that  the  case  made  out  for  King  Henry  is  pretty  weak,  and 
the  case  made  out  against  Queen  Mary  is  much  weaker.  But 
Mr.  Froude  is  among  the  rare  Deucalions  of  historic  literature : 
he  cannot  cast  a  stone  but  it  becomes  alive. 

Thirdly,  and  still  rising  in  the  scale  of 'incontestability,  though 
even  so  contested,  I  believe,  by  some,  is  the  merit  of  style.  I  have 
sometimes  doubted  whether  Mr.  Froude  at  his  best  has  any 
superior  among  the  prose  writers  of  the  last  half  of  this  century. 
His  is  not  a  catching  style ;  and  in  particular  it  does  not  perhaps 
impress  itself  upon  green  tastes.  It  has  neither  the  popular  and 
slightly  brusque  appeal  of  Macaulay  or  Kinglake,  nor  the  unique 
magnificence  of  Mr.  Ruskin,  nor  the  fretted  and  iridescent 
delicacy  of  some  other  writers.  It  must  be  frankly  confessed  that, 
the  bulk  of  his  work  being  very  great  and  his  industry  not 
being  untiring,  it  is  unequal,  and  sometimes  not  above  (it  is  never 
below)  good  journey-work.  But  at  its  best  it  is  of  a  simply 
wonderful  attraction — simply  in  the  pure  sense,  for  it  is  never 
very  ornate,  and  does  not  proceed  in  point  of  "  tricks "  much 
beyond  the  best  varieties  of  the  latest  Georgian  form.  That 
strange  quality  of  "  liveliness  "  which  has  been  noticed  in  reference 
to  its  author's  view  of  history  animates  it  throughout.  It  is 


252  THE  HISTORIANS  OF  THE  CENTURY 


never  flat,  never  merely  popular,  never  merely  scholarly,  never 
merely  "  precious "  and  eccentric ;  and  at  its  very  best  it  is 
excelled  by  no  style  in  this  century,  and  approached  by  few  in 
this  or  any  other,  as  a  perfect  harmony  of  unpretentious  music, 
adjusted  to  the  matter  that  it  conveys,  and  lingering  on  the  ear 
that  it  reaches. 

NOTE. — As  examples  of  the  almost  enforced  omissions  referred  to  in  the 
text  may  be  mentioned  earlier  Archdeacon  Coxe,  the  biographer  of  Marlborough 
and  the  historian  of  the  House  of  Austria  ;  later,  Finlay  (1799-1875))  the  valiant 
successor  of  Gibbon,  and  the  chronicler  of  the  obscure  and  thankless  fortunes 
of  the  country  called  Greece  after  it  had  ceased  to  be  living.  Professor 
Sir  J.  R.  Seeley,  Kingsley's  successor  at  Cambridge  (1834-94),  equally  dis- 
tinguished in  his  professional  business,  and  as  a  lay  theologian  in  a  sense  rather 
extra-orthodox  than  unorthodox  ;  and  Sir  William  Stirling-Maxwell,  no  mean 
historian  either  in  the  general  sense  or  in  the  special  department  of  Art.  It  is 
open  to  any  one  to  contend  that  each  and  all  of  these  as  well  deserve  notice  as 
not  a  few  dealt  with  above  ;  yet  if  they  were  admitted  others  still  could  hardly 
be  excluded.  There  is  one  inchision  which  has  now  to  be  made,  with  a 
sorrow  the  expression  of  which,  even  in  such  a  book  as  this,  may  be  pardoned 
to  a  friendship  of  nearly  forty  years.  Mandell  Creighlon  was  born  in  1843 
at  Carlisle,  and  educated  at  Durham  Grammar  School  and  at  Merton  College. 
Oxford,  of  which  he  became  Fellow  and  Tutor  in  1866-67.  After  holding 
his  post  for  some  eight  years,  he  took  a  college  living  at  Embleton,  in  Nor- 
thumberland, for  ten  more,  and  in  1884  became  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical 
History  at  Cambridge,  receiving  soon  afterwards  a  Canonry  at  Worcester. 
In  1891  he  was  made  Bishop  of  Peterborough,  and  being  translated  to  London 
six  years  later,  died  in  January  1901  of  disease  accelerated  by  the  crushing 
work  of  his  see.  Except  during  his  life  at  Embleton,  first  college  and  uni- 
versity, and  then  diocesan  duties  prevented  him  from  undertaking  any  work 
of  great  compass,  though  he  wrote,  both  early  and  late,  divers  books,  all  of  a 
historical  kind  and  of  much  value.  The  comparative  (and  only  comparative) 
leisure  of  his  parish  enabled  him  to  prepare,  and  between  1882  and  1894  to 
publish,  five  volumes  of  an  elaborate  and  invaluable  History  of  the  Papacy 
during  the  Reformation.  He  had  done  much  while  at  Oxford  to  strengthen 
and  extend  the  remarkable  Historical  School  founded  there  by  Bishop  Stubbs 
(a  much  older  man  (1825-1901),  whose  death  followed  Dr.  Creighton's  very 
shortly,  and  whose  Constitutional  History  (1874-78)  is  one  of  the  greatest 
books  of  the  kind)  and  S'>me  others.  And  he  continued  the  same  work  at 
Cambridge,  being,  during  this  later  time,  first  editor  of  the  English  Historical 
Review.  But  his  literary  accomplishment,  though  great,  was  but  the  partial 
expression  of  a  much  wider  and  more  complex  faculty  of  influence  which 
he  possessed,  and  exercised  as  few  men  of  his  time  have  been  able  to  do. 


CHAPTER    VI 

THE    SECOND    POETICAL    PERIOD 

THE  second  period  of  English  poetry  in  the  nineteenth  century 
displays  a  variety  and  abundance  of  poetical  accomplishment 
which  must  rank  it  very  little  below  either  its  immediate  pre- 
decessor, or  even  the  great  so-called  Elizabethan  era.  But  it  is 
distinguished  from  both  these  periods,  and,  indeed,  from  almost 
all  others  by  the  extraordinary  predominance  of  a  single  poet  in 
excellence,  in  influence,  and  in  duration.  There  is  probably  no 
other  instance  anywhere  of  a  poet  who  for  more  than  sixty  years 
wrote  better  poetry  than  any  one  of  his  contemporaries  who 
were  not  very  old  men  when  he  began,  and  for  exactly  fifty 
of  those  years  was  recognised  by  the  best  judges  as  the  chief  poet 
of  his  country  if  not  of  his  time. 

Alfred  Tennyson  was  born  in  1809  at  Somersby,  in  Lincoln- 
shire, where  his  father,  a  member  of  a  good  county  family,  was 
rector.  He  was  the  third  son,  and  his  two  elder  brothers, 
Frederick  and  Charles,  both  possessed  considerable  poetical 
gifts,  though  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  Poems  by  Two  Brothers 
(it  seems  that  it  should  really  have  been  "three"),  which  appeared 
in  1826,  display  much  of  this,  or  anything  whatever  of  Alfred's 
subsequent  charm.  From  the  Grammar  School  of  Louth  the 
poet  went  to  Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  where  he  was  contem- 
porary, and  in  most  cases  intimate,  with  an  unusually  distinguished 
set  of  undergraduates,  many  of  whom  afterwards  figured  in  the 
famous  Sterling  Club  (see  Chapter  IV.).  He  also  did  what  not 


254  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 


many  great  future  poets  have  done,  he  obtained  the  Chancellor's 
prize  for  English  verse  with  a  poem  on  "  TimbuctOO,"  where  again 
his  special  note  is  almost,  though  perhaps  not  quite,  absent :  it 
appears  faintly  and  fitfully  in  another  juvenile  poem  not  formally 
published  till  long  afterwards,  "  The  Lover's  Tale." 

It  was  in  1830  that  he  made  his  first  substantive  appearance 
with  a  book  of  Poems.  This  volume  was  afterwards  subjected 
to  a  severe  handling  by  the  poet  in  the  way  of  revision  and 
omission — processes  which  through  life  he  continued  with  such 
perseverance  and  rigour,  that  the  final  critical  edition  of  him, 
when  it  appears,  will  be  one  of  the  most  complicated  of  the 
kind  in  English  literature.  So  did  he  also  with  another  which 
appeared  two  years  (or  a  little  more)  later.  It  is  not  therefore 
quite  just  to  judge  the  criticism  which  these  books  received  by 
the  present  condition  of  the  poems  which  figured  in  them  ;  for 
though  most  of  the  beauties  were  there  then,  they  were  accom- 
panied by  many  defects  which  are  not  there  now.  Criticism,  how- 
ever, was  undoubtedly  unfavourable,  and  even  unfair.  Although 
Tennyson  was  not,  either  at  this  time  or  at  any  other,  a  party 
politician,  the  two  great  Tory  periodicals,  the  Quarterly  Review 
and  Blackivood 's  Magazine,  were  still  animated,  the  former  by  a 
dislike  to  the  Romantic  school  in  poetry,  the  latter  by  a  dislike  to 
"  Cockneys " — though  how  anybody  could  have  discovered  a 
Cockney  in  Tennyson  may  seem  marvellous  enough.  Accordingly 
Lockhart  in  the  one  and  Wilson  in  the  other  fell  foul  (though  in 
Wilson's  case,  at  least,  not  indiscriminately)  of  work  which  beyond 
all  question  offered  very  numerous  and  very  convenient  handles, 
in  ways  which  will  be  mentioned  presently,  to  merely  carping 
criticism.  Some  attempts  at  reply  were  made  by  the  poet's 
friends,  notably  A.  H.  Hallam,  but  the  public  did  not  take  to 
him,  and  even  well-affected  and  competent  older  judges,  such 
as  Coleridge,  expressed  very  qualified  admiration. 

But  during  the  next  decade,  in  which  he  gave  himself  up 
silently  to  the  task  of  perfecting  his  art,  attempting  no  profession 
or  literary  occupation  of  profit,  and  living  (partly  in  London,  partly 


vi  TENNYSON  255 

in  the  country  at  High  Beach  and  elsewhere)  with  extreme  sim- 
plicity and  economy  on  his  own  small  means  and  a  pension  which 
was  provided  for  him,  the  leaven  of  an  almost  fanatical  admiration 
was  spreading  among  readers  of  his  own  age  or  a  little  younger. 
And  his  next  publication,  a  new  issue  of  Poems  in  1 842 — containing 
the  final  selection  and  revision  of  the  others  already  mentioned, 
and  a  large  reinforcement  of  admirable  work — was  received,  not 
indeed  with  the  popular  avidity  which  had  been  displayed  towards 
Scott  and  Byron  in  the  generation  before,  and  which  revived  in 
the  case  of  his  own  later  work,  but  with  an  immense  enjoyment  by 
almost  all  true  lovers  of  poetry.  Even  Wordsworth,  the  most  un- 
gracious critic  of  other  men's  work  in  his  own  art  of  whom  the 
history  of  literature  gives  record,  acknowledged  Tennyson  in  the 
amplest  terms. 

This  was,  as  has  been  hinted  above,  exactly  fifty  years  before 
his  death,  and  though  in  the  first  of  these  five  decades  the  pudding 
if  not  the  praise  was  still  rather  scanty,  his  reputation  waxed 
steadily  and  never  waned.  To  keep  for  the  present  to  chronicle 
in  biography  and  bibliography,  he  published  in  1847  tne  exquisite 
"medley"  of  The  Princess,  his  first  attempt  at  a  poem  of  any 
length.  1850  was  a  great  year  in  his  career,  for  in  it  he  published 
the  collection  of  elegiacs  on  his  friend  Arthur  Hallam,  in 
which  some  have  seen  his  most  perfect  work,  and  he  became 
Poet  Laureate.  Three  years  later  he  bought  a  house  at 
Farringford,  near  Freshwater  in  the  Isle  of  Wight,  which  was  for 
the  rest  of  his  life  his  occasional  and,  until  1870  (when  to  avoid 
intrusion  he  built  himself  another  at  Aldworth  near  Haslemere), 
his  main  house.  His  poetry  now  was  beginning  to  bring  in 
some  profit,  the  editions  of  it  multiplying  every  year  ;  and  during 
the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life,  if  not  more,  he  was  probably  at 
least  as  richly  provided  with  mere  gold  as  any  poet  has  ever 
been.  He  was,  however,  never  seduced  into  hasty  writing ;  and 
he  never  gave  himself  to  any  other  occupation  than  poetry,  while 
during  his  entire  life  he  was  a  hater  of  what  is  commonly  called 
society.  In  1855  there  appeared  Maud,  the  reception  of  which 


256  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

seemed  at  first  something  of  a  relapse  in  welcome,  which  was  in 
its  first  form  open  to  some  criticism,  and  which  he  touched  up  to 
pne  of  the  finest  as  a  whole,  as  it  was  in  parts  one  of  the  most 
passionate  and  melodious  of  his  works.  But  the  Idylls  of  the 
King,  the  first  and  best  instalment  of  which  appeared  in  1858, 
completely  revived  even  his  popular  vogue,  and  made  him  indeed 
popular  as  no  poet  had  been  since  Byron.  It  was  said  at  the 
time  that  17,000  copies  of  Enoch  Arden,  his  next  volume  (1864), 
were  sold  on  the  morning  of  publication. 

For  the  rest  of  his  life  his  issues  were  pretty  frequent,  though  the 
individual  volumes  were  never  large.  A  series  of  dramas  beginning 
with  Queen  Mary  in  1875,  and  continuing  through  Harold,  The 
Falcon,  The. Cup,  the  unlucky  Promise  of  May,  Becket,  and  The 
Foresters,  though  fine  enough  for  any  other  man,  could  be  better 
spared  by  his  critical  admirers  than  any  other  portion  of  his 
works.  But  the  volumes  of  poems  proper,  which  appeared 
between  1864  and  his  death,  Lucretius,  Tiresias,  the  successive 
instalments  of  the  Idylls,  Locksley  Hall  Sixty  Years  After,  Demeter, 
The  Death  of  GLnone,  and  perhaps  above  all  the  splendid  Ballads 
of  1880,  never  failed  to  contain  with  matter  necessarily  of  varying 
excellence  things  altogether  incomparable — one  of  the  last,  the 
finest  and  fortunately  also  the  most  popular,  being  the  famous 
"Crossing  the  Bar,"  which  appeared  in  his  penultimate,  but  last 
not  posthumous,  volume  in  1889.  He  died  at  Aldworth  in 
October  1892,  and  was  buried  with  an  unequalled  solemnity  in 
Westminster  Abbey. 

In  the  case  of  no  English  poet  is  it  more  important  and 
interesting  than  in  the  case  of  Tennyson,  considering  the 
excellence  of  his  own  work  in  the  first  place,  and  the  altogether 
unparalleled  extent  of  his  influence  in  the  second,  to  trace  the 
nature  and  character  of  his  poetical  quality.  Nor  is  this  difficult, 
though  strange  to  say  it  has  not  always  been  done.  In  his 
very  earliest  work,  so  soon  as  this  quality  appeared  at  all,  it  is  to 
be  discovered  side  by  side  with  other  things  which  are  not  native. 
Undoubtedly  the  tradition  which,  in  the  general  filiation  of 


vi  TENNYSON  257 

English  poetry,  connects  Tennyson  with  Keats  is  not  wholly 
wrong.  In  many  of  the  weaker  things,  and  not  a  few  of  the 
better,  of  the  volumes  of  1830  and  1832,  there  is  to  be  seen  both 
the  wonderful  music  which  Keats  attained  by  a  combination  of 
the  classical  and  romantic  appeals — the  appeals  which  in  his  own 
case  are  singly  exhibited  at  their  best  in  the  "  Grecian  Urn  "  and 
in  "La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci," — and  the  sometimes  faulty  and 
illegitimate  means  which  Keats  took  to  produce  this  effect.  But 
to  any  one  who  compares  rationally  (and  it  may  be  permitted  to 
remark  parenthetically,  that  nothing  seems  to  be  more  misunder- 
stood than  the  comparative  point  of  view)  the  difference  between 
Keats  and  Tennyson  will  emerge  at  once.  Both  being  great  poets, 
there  is  the  inexplicable  in  both ;  while  as  Keats  undoubtedly 
died  before  he  had  any  chance  of  applying  to  his  own  powers  and 
products  the  unequalled  process  of  clarifying  and  self-criticism 
which  went  on  with  Tennyson  in  the  ten  years'  silence  between 
the  second  of  the  volumes  just  mentioned  and  his  issue  of  1842, 
it  is  impossible  to  say  that  Keats  himself  could  not  have  done 
something  similar.  Nothing  that  he  ever  did  is  worse  in  point  of 
"  gush,"  of  undisciplined  fluency,  of  mistakes  in  point  of  taste  and 
of  other  defects,  than  the  notorious  piece  about  "the  darling  little 
room,"  on  which  the  future  Poet  Laureate's  critics  were  so  justly 
severe ;  while  in  the  single  point  of  passion  it  is  very  doubtful 
whether  Tennyson  ever  approached  the  author  of  "  La  Belle  Dame 
sans  Merci."  There  was  not,  perhaps,  much  to  choose  between 
the  two  in  their  natural  power  of  associating  pictorial  with  musical 
expression ;  while  both  had  that  gift  of  simple  humanity,  of  plain 
honest  healthy  understanding  of  common  things,  the  absence  of 
which  gives  to  Shelley — in  some  ways  a  greater  poet  than  either  of 
them — a  certain  unearthliness  and  unreality. 

But  Tennyson  had  from  the  first  a  wider  range  of  interest  and 
capacity  than  Keats,  and  he  had  the  enormous  advantage  of 
thorough  and  regular  literary  training.  No  poet  ever  improved 
his  own  work  as  Tennyson  did ;  nor  has  any,  while  never  allowing 
his  genius  to  be  daunted  by  self-comparison  with  his  predecessors, 

s 


THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


had  such  a  faculty  of  availing  himself  of  what  they  had  done 
without  copying,  of  seeing  what  they  had  not  done  and  supplying 
the  gap  himself.  And  besides  this  he  had  the  inexplicable,  the 
incommunicable,  the  unique,  the  personal  gift.  In  the  very  earliest 
things,  in  "  Claribel,"  in  "  Mariana,"  in  the  "  Recollections  of  the 
Arabian  Nights,"  in  the  "  Ode  to  Memory,"  in  the  "  Dirge,"  in  the 
"  Dying  Swan,"  in  "  Oriana,"  there  is  even  to  those  who  were  born 
long  after  they  were  written,  even  to  those  who  have  for  years 
sedulously  compared  them  with  almost  all  things  before  and  with 
all  things  since,  the  unmistakable  note  of  the  new,  of  the  new  that 
never  can  be  old.  It  is  there  in  the  rhythms,  it  is  there  in  the 
phrase.  The  poet  may  take  things  that  had  previously  existed- — 
the  Keatsian  and  Shelleian  lyric,  the  Wordsworthian  attitude  to 
Nature,  the  Miltonic  blank  verse  ;  but  inevitably,  invariably,  each 
under  his  hands  becomes  different,  becomes  individual  and  original. 
The  result  cannot  be  accounted  for  by  mannerisms,  from  which 
at  no  time  was  Tennyson  free,  and  after  the  thousands  and  ten 
thousands  of  imitations  which  have  been  seen  since,  it  stands 
out  untouched,  unrivalled. 

In  the  next  instalment  this  quality  of  intense  poetical  in- 
dividuality strengthened  and  deepened.  As  we  read  "  The  Two 
Voices,"  "  CEnone,"  "The  Palace  of  Art,"  "  The  Lotos-Eaters,"  "A 
Dream  of  Fair  Women,"  it  becomes  almost  incomprehensible 
how  any  one  who  ever  read  them  even  in  forms  less  perfect 
than  those  that  we  possess,  should  have  mistaken  their  incompar- 
able excellence.  But  the  student  of  literary  history  knows  better. 
He  knows  that  nearly  always  the  poet  has  to  create  his  audience, 
that  he  sings  before  the  dawn  of  the  day  in  which  he  is  to  be 
sovereign. 

And  then  with  the  1842  book  came  practically  the  completion 
of  Tennyson  in  the  sense  of  the  indication  of  his  powers.  Edward 
Fitz-Gerald,  as  is  elsewhere  noticed,  thought,  or  at  least  said,  that 
everything  his  friend  had  done  after  this  was  more  or  less  a 
declension.  This  is  a  common  and  not  an  ignoble  Fallacy  of 
Companionship  —  the  delusion  of  those  who  have  hailed  and 


TENNYSON  259 


accompanied  a  poet  or  a  prophet  in  his  early  struggles.  It  is 
not  even  wholly  a  fallacy,  inasmuch  as,  in  the  case  of  the  class  of 
poets  to  which  Tennyson  belongs,  there  does  come  a  time  when 
the  rest  of  the  products  of  their  genius  is  so  to  speak  applied  : 
it  ceases  to  reveal  them  in  new  aspects.  They  do  not  repeat 
themselves ;  but  they  chiefly  vary.  Now  came  the  magnificent 
"  Morte  D' Arthur,"  (the  "  Idylls  of  the  King  "  in  microcosm,  with 
all  their  merits  and  none  of  their  defects),  "  St.  Simeon  Stylites," 
"Ulysses,"  "Locksley  Hall,"  "  St.  Agnes'  Eve,"  and  other  exquisite 
things ;  while  to  this  period,  as  the  subsequent  arrangement 
shows,  belong  not  a  few,  such  as  "  Tithonus  "  and  "  The  Voyage," 
which  were  not  actually  published  till  later,  and  in  which  keen 
observers  at  the  time  of  their  publication  detected  as  it  were  an 
older  ring,  a  more  genuine  and  unblended  vintage. 

It  is  not  improper,  therefore,  to  break  off  here  for  a  moment 
and  to  endeavour  to  state  —  leaving  out  the  graces  that  can 
never  be  stated,  and  are  more  important  than  all  the  others — the 
points  in  which  this  new  excellence  of  Tennyson  differed  from 
the  excellences  of  his  forerunners.  One  of  them,  not  the  least 
important,  but  the  least  truly  original,  because  something 
distantly  resembling  it  had  been  seen  before  in  Keats  and 
Shelley,  is  the  combined  application  of  pictorial  and  musical 
handling.  Not,  of  course,  that  all  poets  had  not  endeavoured  to 
depict  their  subjects  vividly  and  to  arrange  the  picture  in  a 
melodious  frame  of  sound,  not  that  the  best  of  them  had  not 
also  endeavoured  to  convey,  if  it  were  possible,  the  colours  into 
the  sense,  the  sense  into  the  music.  But  partly  as  a  result  of 
the  natural  development  and  acquired  practice  of  the  language, 
partly  for  the  very  reason  that  the  arts  both  of  painting  and 
music  had  themselves  made  independent  progress,  most  of  all, 
perhaps,  because  Tennyson  was  the  first  poet  in  English  of  the 
very  greatest  genius  who  dared  not  to  attempt  work  on  the  great 
scale,  but  put  into  short  pieces  (admitting,  of  course,  of  infinite 
formal  variety)  what  most  of  his  forerunners  would  have  spun 
into  long  poems — the  result  here  is,  as  a  rule,  far  in  advance 


260  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

of  those  forerunners  in  this  respect,  and  as  an  exception  on  a 
level  with  the  very  best  of  their  exceptions.  With  Shakespeare 
there  is  no  comparison  ;  Shakespeare  can  send  to  every  poet 
in  his  own  style  an  "O  of  Giotto"  to  which  that  poet  must 
bow.  But  of  others  only  Spenser  had  hitherto  drawn  such 
pictures  as  those  of  the  "  Palace  "  and  the  "  Dream,"  and  Spenser 
had  done  them  in  far  less  terse  fashion  than  Tennyson.  Only 
Keats,  Shelley,  Coleridge,  Blake,  perhaps  Beddoes,  and  a  few 
Elizabethans,  had  poured  into  the  veins  of  language  the  ineffable 
musical  throb  of  a  score  of  pieces  from  "  Claribel "  to  "  Break  ! 
Break  ! "  and  not  one  of  them  had  done  it  in  quite  the  same  way. 
Only  Milton,  with  Thomson  as  a  far  distant  second,  had  impressed 
upon  non-dramatic  blank  verse  such  a  swell  and  surge  as  that  of 
"CEnone."  And  about  all  these  different  kinds  and  others 
there  clung  and  rang  a  peculiar  dreamy  slow  music  which  was 
heard  for  the  first  time,  and  which  has  never  been  reproduced, 
—a  music  which  in  "  The  Lotos-Eaters,"  impossible  as  it  might 
have  seemed,  ad'ds  a  new  charm  after  the  Faerie  Queen,  after  the 
Castle  of  Indolence,  after  the  Rei'olt  of  Islam,  to  the  Spenserian 
stanza,  which  makes  the  stately  verses  of  the  "  Palace "  and  the 
"  Dream "  tremble  and  cry  with  melodious  emotion,  and  which 
accomplishes  the  miracle  of  the  poet's  own  dying  swan  in  a 
hundred  other  poems  all  "  flooded  over  with  eddying  song." 

But  there  is  something  more  to  be  noted  still.  The  poet  had 
caught  and  was  utilising  the  spirit  of  his  time  in  two  ways,  one  of 
them  almost  entirely  new.  That  he  constantly  sang  the  subjective 
view  of  nature  may  be  set  down  to  the  fact  that  he  came  after 
Wordsworth,  though  the  fact  that  he  sang  it  without  the  Words- 
worthian  dryness  and  dulness  must  be  set  down  to  his  own  credit. 
But  in  that  sense  of  the  history  of  former  times,  which  is  perhaps 
the  chief  glory  of  the  nineteenth  century,  in  matters  of  thought 
he  had  been  anticipated  by  no  one.  He  might  not  have  attained 
it  without  Scolt  and  Byron,  but  his  expression  of  it  was  hardly 
conditioned  in  the  very  slightest  degree  by  the  expression  either 
of  Byron  or  of  Scott.  They  were  not  in  strictness  men  of  the 


vi  TENNYSON  261 

nineteenth  century;  he  was,  and  he  represented  the  very  best 
features  of  his  time  in  attending,  from  its  point  of  view  mainly,  to 
the  features  of  better- times. 

But  if  Fitz-Gerald's  dictum  were  taken  in  the  sense  that 
Tennyson's  poetical  career  might,  with  advantage  or  with  anything 
but  the  greatest  possible  loss,  have  been  closed  in  1842,  then 
certainly  it  would  be  something  worse  than  a  crotchet.  Nothing 
perhaps  appeared  subsequently  (with  unimportant  exceptions, 
such  as  the  plays,  and  as  the  dialect  pieces  of  which  the  "  Northern 
Farmer "  was  the  first  and  best)  the  possibility  of  which  could 
not  have  been  divined  from  the  earlier  work.  The  tree  had 
blossomed ;  it  had  almost,  to  keep  up  the  metaphor,  set ;  but  by 
far  the  greater  part  of  the  fruit  was  yet  to  ripen,  and  very  much 
of  it  was  to  be  of  quality  not  inferior,  of  quantity  far  greater, 
than  anything  that  had  yet  been  given. 

The  Princess  and  In  Memoriam,  the  two  firstfruits  of  this 
later  crop,  were  certainly  not  the  least  important.  Indeed  they 
may  be  said  to  have  shown  for  the  first  time  that  the  poet  was 
capable  of  producing,  in  lighter  and  severer  styles  respectively,  work 
not  limited  to  short  flights  and  exemplifying  what  (perhaps 
mistakenly)  is  called  "  thought,"  as  well  as  style  and  feeling, 
colour  and  music.  The  Princess  is  undoubtedly  Tennyson's 
greatest  effort,  if  not  exactly  in  comedy,  in  a  vein  verging  towards 
the  comic— a  side  on  which  he  was  not  so  well  equipped  for 
offence  or  for  defence  as  on  the  other.  But  it  is  a  masterpiece. 
Exquisite  as  its  author's  verse  always  is,  it  was  never  more 
exquisite  than  here,  whether  in  blank  verse  or  in  the  (super- 
added)  lyrics,  while  none  of  his  deliberately  arranged  plays 
contains  characters  half  so  good  as  those  of  the  Princess  herself, 
of  Lady  Blanche  and  Lady  Psyche,  of  Cyril,  of  the  two  Kings, 
and  even  of  one  or  two  others.  And  that  unequalled  dream- 
faculty  of  his,  which  has  been  more  than  once  glanced  at, 
enabled  him  to  carry  off  whatever  was  fantastical  in  the  con- 
ception with  almost  unparalleled  felicity.  It  may  or  may  not 
be  agreed  that  the  question  of  the  equality  of  the  sexes  is  one 


262  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

of  the  distinguishing  questions  of  this  century;  and  some  of 
those  who  would  give  it  that  position  may  or  may  not  maintain, 
if  they  think  it  worth  while,  that  it  is  treated  here  too  lightly, 
while  their  opponents  may  wish  that  it  had  been  treated  more 
lightly  still.  But  this  very  difference  will  point  the  unbiassed 
critic  to  the  same  conclusion,  that  Tennyson  has  hit  the  golden 
mean ;  while  that,  whatever  he  has  hit  or  missed  in  subject,  the 
verse  of  his  essay  is  golden  no  one  who  is  competent  will  doubt. 
Such  lyric  as  "The  splendour  falls "  and  "Tears,  idle  tears,"  such 
blank  verse  as  that  of  the  closing  passage,  would  raise  to  the 
topmost  heights  of  poetry  whatever  subject  it  was  spent  upon. 

In  Memoriam  attacked  two  subjects  in  the  main, — the  one 
perennial,  the  other  of  the  time, — just  as  The  Princess  had  done. 
The  perennial,  which  is  often  but  another,  if  not  an  exclusive, 
word  for  the  poetical,  was  in  the  first  case  aspirant  and  happy 
love,  in  the  other  mourning  friendship.  The  ephemeral  was,  in 
the  latter,  the  sort  of  half  doubting  religiosity  which  has  occupied 
so  much  of  the  thought  of  our  day.  On  this  latter  point,  as  on 
the  other  just  mentioned  and  on  most  beside,  the  attitude  of 
Tennyson  was  "  Liberal-Conservatism  "  (if  political  slang  may  be 
generalised),  inclining  always  to  the  Conservative  rather  than  to  the 
Liberal  side,  but  giving  Liberalism  a  sufficient  footing  and  hearing. 
Here  again  opinions  may  be  divided ;  and  here  again  those  who 
think  that  in  poetry  the  mere  fancies  of  the  moment  are  nothing 
may  be  disposed  to  pay  little  attention  to  the  particular  fancies 
which  have  occupied  the  poet.  But  here  again  the  manner,  as 
always  with  real  poets,  carries  off,  dissolves,  annihilates  the  special 
matter  for  poetical  readers.  Tennyson  had  here  taken  (not 
invented)  a  remarkable  and  not  frequently  used  stanza,  the 
iambic  dimeter  quatrain  with  the  rhymes  not  alternated,  but 
arranged  abba.  It  is  probable  that  if  a  well -instructed  critic 
had  been  asked  beforehand  what  would  be  the  effect  of  this 
employed  with  a  certain  monotone  of  temper  and  subject  in  a 
book  of  some  three  thousand  lines  or  so,  he  would  have  shaken 
his  head  and  hinted  that  the  substantive  would  probably  justify 


VI  TENNYSON  203 

its  adjective  and  the  monotone  become  monotonous.  And  if  he 
had  been  really  a  deacon  in  his  craft  he  would  have  added : 
"  But  to  a  poet  there  is  nothing  impossible."  The  difficulty  was 
no  impossibility  to  Tennyson.  He  has  not  only,  in  the  rather 
more  than  six  score  poems  of  this  wonderful  book,  adjusted  his 
medium  to  a  wide  range  of  subjects,  all  themselves  adjusted  to 
the  general  theme,  but  he  has  achieved  that  poetic  miracle,  the 
communication  to  the  same  metre  and  to  no  very  different 
scheme  of  phrase  of  an  infinite  variety  of  interior  movement. 
There  is  scarcely  a  bad  line  in  In  Memoriam  ;  there  are  few  lines 
that  do  not  contain  a  noble  thought,  a  passionate  sentiment,  a 
beautiful  picture ;  but  there  is  nothing  greater  about  it  than  the 
way  in  which,  side  by  side  with  the  prevailing  undertone  of  the 
stanza,  the  individual  pieces  vary  the  music  and  accompany  it,  so 
to  speak,  in  duet  with  a  particular  melody.  It  must  have  been 
already  obvious  to  good  ears  that  no  greater  master  of  English 
harmonics — perhaps  that  none  so  great— had  ever  lived ;  but  In 
Memoriam  set  the  fact  finally  and  irrevocably  on  record. 

Maud  was  the  third,  and  perhaps  it  may  be  said  to 
have  been,  on  a  great  scale,  the  last  experiment  in  thus  com- 
bining the  temporal  with  the  eternal.  It  was  also  probably 
che  weakest  as  a  whole,  though  the  poet  had  never  done  more 
poetical  things  than  the  passage  beginning,  "  Cold  and  clear-cut 
face " ;  than  the  prothalamium,  never  to  have  its  due  sequel, 
"  I  have  led  her  home  "  ;  than  the  incomparable  and  never-to-be- 
hackneyed  "  Come  into  the  garden " ;  or  than  the  best  of  all, 
"  Oh  !  that  'twere  possible."  It  may  even  be  contended  that  if 
it  were  ever  allowable  to  put  the  finger  down  and  say,  "Here  is 
the  highest,"  these,  and  not  the  best  things  of  the  1842  volumes, 
are  the  absolute  summit  of  the  poet's  effort,  the  point  which, 
though  he  was  often  near  it,  he  never  again  quite  reached.  But 
the  piece,  as  a  whole,  is  certainly  less  of  a  success,  less  smooth 
and  finished  as  it  comes  from  its  own  lathe,  than  either  The 
Princess  or  In  Memoriam.  It  looks  too  like  an  essay  in  compe- 
tition with  the  "  Spasmodic  School  "  of  its  own  day  ;  it  drags  in 


264  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

merely  casual  things — adulteration,  popular  politics,  and  ephemera 
of  all  kinds — too  assiduously,  and  its  characterisations  are  not 
happy.  There  is  a  tradition  that  the  poet  met  a  critic,  and  a 
very  accomplished  critic  too,  who  was  one  of  his  own  oldest 
friends,  and  said,  "  What  do  you  mean  by  calling  Maud  vulgar?" 
"  I  didn't,"  said  the  critic,  quite  truly.  "  No,  but  you  meant  it," 
growled  Tennyson.  And  there  was  something  of  a  confession  in 
the  growl. 

But  these  slight  relapses  (and,  after  all,  what  sort  of  a  relapse 
is  it  which  gives  us  not  merely  the  incomparable  things  referred 
to,  but  others  hardly  less  exquisite  ?)  never,  in  the  great  writers, 
serve  as  anything  but  retreats  before  an  advance ;  and  certainly, 
in  a  sense,  the  Idylls  of  the  King  were  an  advance,  though  not, 
perhaps,  in  all  senses.  No  total  so  brilliant,  so  varied  within  a 
certain  general  unity,  so  perfectly  polished  in  style,  so  cunningly- 
adjusted  to  meet  the  popular  without  disappointing  the  critical 
ear,  had  ever  come  from  Tennyson's  pen  as  the  first  quartet  of 
Idylls,  Enid,  Vivien,  Elaine,  and  Guinevere.  No  such  book  of 
English  blank  verse,  with  the  doubtful  exception  of  the  Seasons,  had 
been  seen  since  Milton.  Nothing  more  adroitly  selected  than 
the  contrast  of  the  four  special  pieces — a  contrast  lost  to  those 
who  only  read  them  in  the  completed  Arthuriad — has  been  often 
attempted  or  ever  achieved.  It  is  true  that  the  inner  faithful,  the 
sacred  band  of  Tennysonians,  old  and  young,  grumbled  a  little 
that  polish  had  been  almost  too  much  attended  to ;  that  there 
was  a  certain  hardish  mannerism,  glittering  but  cold,  about  the 
style ;  that  there  was  noticeable  a  certain  compromise  in  the 
appeal,  a  certain  trimming  of  the  sail  to  the  popular  breeze. 
These  criticisms  were  not  entirely  without  foundation,  and  they 
were  more  justified  than  their  authors  could  know  by  the  later 
instalments  of  the  poem,  which,  the  latest  not  published  till 
twenty-seven  years  afterwards,  rounded  it  off  to  its  present  bulk 
of  twelve  books,  fifteen  separate  pieces,  and  over  ten  thousand 
lines.  Another,  more  pedantic  in  appearance,  but  not  entirely 
destitute  of  weight,  was  that  which  urged  that  in  handling  the 


vi  TENNYSON  265 

Arthurian  story  the  author  had,  so  to  speak,  "  bastardised  it," 
and  had  given  neither  mediaeval  nor  modern  sentiment  or  colour- 
ing, but  a  sort  of  amalgamation  of  both.  Yet  the  charm  of  the 
thing  was  so  great,  and  the  separate  passages  were  so  con- 
summate, that  even  critics  were  loth  to  quarrel  with  such  a  gift. 

The  later  instalments  of  the  poem — some  of  them,  as  has 
been  said,  very  much  later,  but  still  so  closely  connected  as 
to  be  best  noticed  here- — were  of  somewhat  less  even  excellence. 
It  was  an  inevitable,  but  certainly  an  unfortunate  thing,  that  the 
poet  republished  the  magnificent  early  fragment  above  noticed  in 
a  setting  which,  fine  as  it  would  have  been  for  any  one  else, 
was  inferior  to  this  work  of  the  very  best  time.  Some  of  the 
lighter  passages,  as  in  Gareth  and  Lynette,  showed  less  grace 
than  their  forerunners  in  The  Princess ;  and  in  Pelkas  and  Ettarre 
and  Balin  and  Balan  the  poet  sometimes  seemed  to  be  attempt- 
ing alien  moods  which  younger  poets  than  himself  had  made 
their  own.  But  the  best  passages  of  some  of  these  later  Idylls, 
notably  those  of  The  Holy  Grail  and  The  Last  Tournament,  were 
among  the  finest,  not  merely  of  the  book,  but  of  the  poet.  No- 
where has  he  caught  the  real,  the  best  spirit  of  the  legends  he 
followed  more  happily,  nowhere  has  he  written  more  magnificent 
verse,  than  in  Percivale's  account  of  his  constantly  baffled  quest 
and  of  Lancelot's  visit  to  the  "  enchanted  towers  of  Carbonek." 

Far  earlier  than  these,  Enoch  Arden  and  its  companion  poems 
were  something  more  of  a  return  to  the  scheme  of  the  earlier  books 
— no  very  long  single  composition,  but  a  medley  of  blank  verse 
pieces  and  lyrics,  the  former  partly  expansions  of  the  scheme  of 
the  earlier  "  English  Idyll,"  the  latter  various  and  generally 
beautiful ;  one  or  two,  such  as  "  In  the  Valley  of  Cauterets,"  of 
the  most  beautiful.  Here,  too,  were  some  interesting  translations, 
with  the  dialect  pieces  above  referred  to  ;  and  all  the  later  volumes, 
except  those  containing  the  plays,  preserved  this  mixed  manner. 
Their  contents  are  too  numerous  for  many  to  be  mentioned  here. 
Only  in  the  Ballads  and  Other  Poems  was  something  like  a 
distinctly  new  note  struck  in  the  two  splendid  patriotic  pieces  on 


266  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


"  The  Last  Fight  of  the  Revenge  "  and  the  "  Defence  of  Lucknow," 
which,  even  more  than  the  poet's  earlier  "Charge  of  the  Light 
Brigade,"  deserve  the  title  of  the  best  English  war-songs  since 
Campbell ;  in  "  Rizpah,"  an  idyll  of  a  sterner  and  more  tragic 
kind  than  anything  he  had  previously  attempted ;  and  in  the 
"  Voyage  of  Maeldune,"  this  last  in  some  respects  the  most 
interesting  of  the  whole.  For  the  marvellous  power  which  great 
poets  possess  of  melting,  of  "  founding,"  so  to  speak,  minor  styles 
and  kinds  of  poetry  to  their  own  image,  while  not  losing  a  certain 
character  of  the  original,  has  never  been  shown  better  than  here. 
Attention  had,  even  before  the  date  of  this  poem,  been  drawn  to 
the  peculiar  character  of  early  Celtic  poetry, — not  the  adulterated 
style  of  Ossian,  but  the  genuine  method  of  the  old  Irish  singers. 
And,  since,  a  whole  band  of  young  and  very  clever  writers  have 
set  themselves,  with  a  mixture  of  political  and  poetical  enthusiasm, 
the  task  of  reviving  these  notes  if  possible.  They  have  rarely 
succeeded  in  getting  very  close  to  them  without  mere  archaic 
pastiche.  Tennyson  in  this  poem  carried  away  the  whole  genius 
of  the  Celtic  legend,  infused  it  into  his  own  verse,  branded  it 
with  his  own  seal,  and  yet  left  the  character  of  the  vintage  as 
unmistakable  as  if  he  had  been  an  Irishman  of  the  tenth  century, 
instead  of  an  Englishman  of  the  nineteenth.  And  indeed  there 
are  no  times,  or  countries,  or  languages  in  the  kingdom  of  poetry. 
A  very  little  more  may,  perhaps,  still  be  said  about  this  great 
poet, — great  in  the  character  and  variety  of  his  accomplishment,  in 
the  volume  of  it,  and,  above  all,  in  the  extraordinarily  sustained 
quality  of  his  genius  and  the  length  of  time  during  which  it 
dominated  and  pervaded  the  literature  of  his  country.  The 
influences  of  Pope  and  Dryden  were  weak  in  force  and  merely 
external  in  effect,  the  influence  of  Byron  was  short-lived,  that  of 
Wordsworth  was  partial  and  limited,  in  comparison  with  the 
influence  of  Tennyson.  Of  this,  as  of  a  mere  historical  fact, 
there  can  be  no  dispute  among  those  who  care  to  inform  them- 
selves of  the  facts  and  to  consider  them  coolly.  Of  his  intrinsic 
merit,  as  opposed  to  his  influential  importance,  it  is  not  of  course 


vi  TENNYSON  267 

possible  to  speak  so  peremptorily.  Among  the  great  volume  of 
more  or  less  unfavourable  criticism  which  such  a  career  was  sure 
to  call  forth,  two  notes  perhaps  were  the  most  dominant,  the 
most  constant,  and  (even  fervent  admirers  may  admit)  the  least 
unjust.  He  was  accused  of  a  somewhat  excessive  prettiness,  a 
sort  of  dandyism  and  coquetry  in  form,  and  of  a  certain  want  of 
profundity  in  matter.  The  last  charge  is  the  more  unprofitable  in 
discussion,  for  it  turns  mainly  on  vast  and  vague  questions  of 
previous  definition.  "  What  is  thought  ?  "  "  What  is  profundity  ?  " 
a  by  no  means  jesting  demurrer  may  object,  and  he  will  not  soon 
be  cleared  out  of  the  way.  And  it  will  perhaps  seem  to  some 
that  what  is  called  Tennyson's  lack  of  profundity  consists  only  in 
a  disinclination  on  his  part  to  indulge  in  what  the  Germans  call 
the  Schwdtzerei,  the  endless,  aimless  talkee-talkee  about  "  thought- 
ful" things  in  which  the  nineteenth  century  has  indulged  beyond  the 
record  of  any  since  what  used  to  be  called  the  Dark  Ages.  On 
the  real  "  great  questions  "  Tennyson  was  not  loth  to  speak,  and 
spoke  gravely  enough;  even  to  the  ephemeralities,  as  we  have  said, 
he  paid  rather  too  much  than  too  little  attention.  But  he  did  not 
go  into  the  ins  and  outs  of  them  as  some  of  his  contemporaries 
did,  and  as  other  contemporaries  thought  fitting.  He  usually 
neglected  the  negligible  ;  and  perhaps  it  would  not  hurt  him  with 
posterity  if  he  had  neglected  it  a  little  more,  though  it  hurt  him  a 
little  with  contemporaries  that  he  neglected  it  as  much  as  he  did. 
The  charge  of  prettiness  is  to  be  less  completely  ruled  out ; 
though  it  shows  even  greater  mistake  in  those  who  do  more  than 
touch  very  lightly  on  it.  In  the  earliest  forms  of  the  earlier 
poems  not  seldom,  and  occasionally  in  even  the  latest  forms  of 
the  later,  the  exquisiteness  of  the  poet's  touch  in  music  and  in 
painting,  in  fancy  and  in  form,  did  sometimes  pass  into  something 
like  finicalness,  into  what  is  called  in  another  language  mignardise. 
But  this  was  only  the  necessary,  and,  after  he  was  out  of  his 
apprenticeship,  the  minimised  effect  of  his  great  poetical  quality 
—  that  very  quality  of  exquisiteness  in  form,  in  fancy,  in 
painting,  and  in  music  which  has  just  been  stated.  We  have, 


268  THK  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP 

it  must  he  admitted,  had  greater  poets  than  Tennyson.  Shake- 
speare, Spenser,  Milton,  Shelley,  undoubtedly  deserve  this  pre- 
ference to  him  ;  Wordsworth  and  Keats  may  deserve  it.  But  we 
have  had  none  so  uniformly,  and  over  such  a  large  mass  of  work, 
exquisite.  In  the  lighter  fantastic  veins  he  may  sometimes  be  a 
little  unsure  in  touch  and  taste ;  in  satire  and  argument  a  little 
heavy,  a  little  empty,  a  little  rhetorical ;  in  domestic  and  ethical 
subjects  a  little  tame.  But  his  handlings  of  these  things  form  a 
very  small  part  of  his  work.  And  in  the  rest  none  of  all  these 
faults  appears,  and  their  absence  is  due  to  the  fact  that  nothing 
interferes  with  the  exquisite  perfection  of  the  form.  Some  faults 
have  been  found  with  Tennyson's  rhymes,  though  this  is  generally 
hypercriticism ;  and  in  his  later  years  he  was  a  little  too  apt  to 
accumulate  tribrachs  in  his  blank  verse,  a  result  of  a  mistaken 
sense  of  the  true  fact  that  he  was  better  at  slow  rhythms  than  at 
quick,  and  of  an  attempt  to  cheat  nature.  But  in  all  other 
respects  his  versification  is  by  far  the  most  perfect  of  any  English 
poet,  and  results  in  a  harmony  positively  incomparable.  So  also 
his  colour  and  outline  in  conveying  the  visual  image  are  based  on 
a  study  of  natural  fact  and  a  practice  in  transferring  it  to  words 
which  are  equally  beyond  comparison.  Take  any  one  of  a  myriad 
of  lines  of  Tennyson,  and  the  mere  arrangement  of  vowels  and  con- 
sonants will  be  a  delight  to  the  ear  ;  let  any  one  of  a  thousand  of 
his  descriptions  body  itself  before  the  eye,  and  the  picture  will  be 
like  the  things  seen  in  a  dream,  but  firmer  and  clearer. 

Although,  as  has  been  said,  the  popularity  of  Lord  Tennyson 
itself  was  not  a  plant  of  very  rapid  growth,  and  though  but  a 
short  time  before  his  position  was  undisputed  it  was  admitted 
only  by  a  minority,  imposing  in  quality  but  far  from  strong  in 
mere  numbers,  his  chief  rival  during  the  latter  part  of  their 
joint  lives  was  vastly  slower  in  gaining  the  public  ear.  It  is  not 
quite  pleasant  to  think  that  the  well-merited  but  comparatively 
accidental  distinction  of  the  Laureateship  perhaps  did  more  even 
for  Tennyson  in  this  respect  than  the  intrinsic  value  of  his  work. 
Robert  Browning  had  no  such  aid,  his  verse  was  even  more 


VI  ROBERT  BROWNING  269 

abhorrent  than  Tennyson's  to  the  tradition  of  the  elders,  and 
until  he  found  a  sort  of  back-way  to  please,  he  was  even  more 
indifferent  to  pleasing.  So  that  while  Tennyson  became  in  a 
manner  popular  soon  after  1850,  two  decades  more  had  to  pass 
before  anything  that  could  be  called  popularity  came  to  Browning. 
It  is,  though  the  actual  dates  are  well  enough  known  to  most 
people,  still  something  of  a  surprise  to  remember  that  at  that  time 
he  had  been  writing  for  very  nearly  forty  years,  and  that  his  first 
book,  though  a  little  later  than  Tennyson's,  actually  appeared 
before  the  death  of  Coleridge  and  not  more  than  a  few  months 
after  that  of  Scott.  Browning,  about  whose  ancestry  and  parent- 
age a  good  deal  of  mostly  superfluous  ink  has  been  shed,  was 
born,  the  son  of  a  city  man,  on  7th  May  1812,  in  the,  according  to 
the  elder  Mr.  Weller,  exceptional  district  of  Camberwell.  He  was 
himself  exceptional  enough  in  more  ways  than  one.  His  parents 
had  means ;  but  Browning  did  not  receive  the  ordinary  education 
of  a  well-to-do  Englishman  at  school  and  college,  and  his  learning, 
though  sufficiently  various,  was  privately  obtained.  Pauline^  his 
first  poem,  appeared  in  1833,  but  had  been  written  about  two 
years  earlier.  He  did  not  reprint  it  in  the  first  general  collection 
of  his  verse,  nor  till  after  his  popularity  had  been  established  ;  and 
it  cannot  be  said  to  be  of  great  intrinsic  excellence.  But  it  was 
distinctly  characteristic  : — first,  in  a  strongly  dramatic  tone  and 
strain  without  regular  dramatic  form ;  secondly,  in  a  peculiar 
fluency  of  decasyllabic  verse  that  could  not  be  directly  traced  to 
any  model  ;  and,  thirdly,  in  a  certain  quality  of  thought,  which  in 
later  days  for  a  long  time  received,  and  never  entirely  lost  from 
the  vulgar,  the  name  of  "obscurity,"  but  which  perhaps  might  be 
more  justly  termed  breathlessness — the  expression,  if  not  the 
conception,  of  a  man  who  either  did  not  stop  at  all  to  pick  his 
words,  or  was  only  careful  to  pick  them  out  of  the  first  choice  that 
presented  itself  to  him  of  something  not  commonplace. 

In  Pauline,  however,  there  is  little  positive  beauty.  In  the  next 
book,  Paracelsus  (183$),  there  is  a  great  deal.  Here  the  dramatic 
form  was  much  more  definite,  though  still  not  attempting  acted  or 


270  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

actable  drama.  The  poet's  appetite  for  "soul-dissection"  was  amply 
shown  in  the  characters  not  merely  of  Paracelsus  himself,  but  of 
his  soberer  friends  Festus  and  Michal,  and  of  the  Italian  poet 
Aprile,  a  sort  of  Euphorion  pretty  evidently  suggested  by,  though 
greatly  enlarged  from,  the  actual  Euphorion  of  the  second  part  of 
Faust,  then  not  long  finished.  The  rapid,  breathless  blank  verse, 
the  crowding  rush  of  simile  and  illustration,  and  the  positive 
plethora  of  meaning,  more  often  glanced  and  hinted  at  than  fully 
worked  out,  were  as  noteworthy  as  before  in  kind,  and  as  much  more 
so  in  degree  as  in  scale.  Here  too  were  lyrics,  not  anticipating 
the  full  splendour  of  the  poet's  later  lyrical  verse,  but  again  quite 
original.  Here,  in  fact,  to  anybody  who  chose  to  pay  attention, 
was  a  real  "  new  poet "  pretty  plainly  announced. 

Very  few  did  choose  to  pay  attention ;  and  Browning's  next 
attempt  was  not  of  a  kind  to  conciliate  halting  or  hostile  opinion, 
though  it  might  please  the  initiated.  He  wrote  for  his  friend  Mac- 
ready  a  play  intended  at  least  to  be  of  the  regular  acting  kind. 
This  play,  Strafford  (1837),  contains  fine  things  ;  but  the  involution 
and  unexpectedness  of  the  poet's  thought  now  and  always  showed 
themselves  least  engagingly  when  they  were  even  imagined  as 
being  spoken,  not  read.  After  yet  another  three  years  Sordello 
followed,  and  here  the  most  peculiar  but  the  least  estimable  side  of 
the  author's  genius  attained  a  prominence  not  elsewhere  equalled, 
till  in  his  latest  stage  he  began  to  parody  himself,  and  scarcel) 
even  then.  Although  this  book  does  not  deserve  the  disgusted 
contempt  which  used  to  be  poured  on  it,  though  it  contains  many 
noble  passages,  and  as  the  "  story  of  a  soul "  is  perfectly  intelligible 
to  moderate  intellects,  it  must  have  occasioned  some  doubts  and 
qualms  to  intelligent  admirers  of  the  poet  as  to  whether  he  would 
lose  himself  in  the  paths  on  which  he  was  entering.  Such  doubts 
must  have  been  soon  set  at  rest  by  the  curious  medley  issued 
in  parts,  under  the  general  title  of  Bells  and  Pomegranates,  between 
1841  and  1 846.  The  plays  here,  though  often  striking  and  showing 
that  the  author's  disabilities,  though  never  likely  to  leave,  were  also 
not  likely  to  master  him,  showed  also,  with  the  possible  exception 


vi  ROBERT  BROWNING  271 


of  the  charming  nondescript  of  Pippa  Passes,  no  new  or  positively 
unexpected  faculty.  But  certain  shorter  things,  lyrical  and  other, 
at  last  made  it  clear  that  Browning  could  sing  as  well  as  say ;  and 
from  this  time,  1846  (which  also  was  the  year  of  his  marriage  with 
Miss  Elizabeth  Barrett),  he  could  claim  rank  as  a  great  poet  He 
had  been  hitherto  more  or  less  a  wanderer,  but  with  headquarters 
in  England ;  he  now  went  to  Florence,  which  in  turn  was  his  head- 
quarters till  his  wife's  death  in  1861.  His  publications  during  the 
time  were  only  two — Christmas  Eve  and  Easter  Day  in  1850,  and 
Men  and  Women  in  1855.  But  these  were  both  master-pieces. 
He  never  did  better  work,  and,  with  Bells  and  Pomegranates  and 
Dramatis  Persona,  which  appeared  in  1864  (when,  after  Mrs. 
Browning's  death,  he  had  returned  to  London),  they  perhaps 
contain  all  his  very  best  work. 

Up  to  this  time,  the  thirty-first  year  from  the  publication  of 
Pauline,  Browning's  work,  though  by  no  means  scanty,  could 
hardly  be  called  voluminous  as  the  result  of  half  a  life-time  of 
absolute  leisure.  A  little  before  Dramatis  Persons — itself  not  a 
long  book,  though  of  hardly  surpassed  quality — the  whole  of  the 
poems  except  Pauline  had  been  gathered  into  three  small  but 
thick  volumes,  which  undoubtedly  did  very  much  to  spread  the 
poet's  fame — a  spread  much  helped  by  their  immediate  successor. 
The  enormous  poem  of  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  originally  issued 
in  four  volumes  and  containing  more  than  twenty  thousand 
verses,  was  published  in  1869,  and,  the  public  being  by  this  time 
well  prepared  for  it,  received  a  welcome  not  below  its  merits. 
Having  at  last  gained  the  public  ear,  Mr.  Browning  did  not  fail 
to  improve  the  occasion,  and  of  the  next  fifteen  years  few  passed 
without  a  volume,  while  some  saw  two,  from  his  pen.  These, 
including  translations  of  the  Alcestis  and  the  Agamemnon  (for  the 
poet  was  at  this  time  seized  with  a  great  fancy  for  Greek,  which 
he  rendered  with  much  fluency,  and  a  very  singular  indulgence  in 
a  sort  of  hybrid  and  pedantic  spelling  of  proper  names),  were 
Balaustioris  Adventure  and  Prince  Hohenstiel-Schwangau  (1871), 
Fifine  at  the  Fair  (1872),  Red  Cotton  Night-Cap  Country  (1873), 


272  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

Aristophanes'  Apology  and  The  Inn  Album  (1875),  Pacchiarotto 
and  how  he  Worked  in  Distemper  (1876),  La  Saisiaz  (1878), 
Dramatic  Idylls,  two  volumes  (1879-80),  Jocoseria  (1883),  and 
FerishtaJis  Fancies  (1884).  The  five  remaining  years  of  Brown- 
ing's long  life  were  somewhat  less  fruitful ;  but  Parleyings  with 
certain  People  of  Importance  came  in  1887,  and  at  the  end  of 
1889,  almost  simultaneously  with  his  death  in  Italy,  Asolando, 
which  some  think  by  far  his  best  volume  since  Dramatis  Persons, 
a  quarter  of  a  century  older.  These  volumes  occasionally 
contained  a  few,  and  Asolando  contained  several,  of  the  lovely 
lyrics  above  referred  to.  But  the  great  bulk  of  them  consisted 
of  the  curious  blank  verse,  now  nairative,  now  ostensibly  dramatic 
monologue,  which  the  poet  had  always  affected,  and  which  he  now 
seemed  to  affect  more  and  more.  In  them,  too,  from  The  Jtitig 
and  the  Book  onwards,  there  appeared  a  tendency  stronger  than 
ever  to  an  eccentric  and  almost  burlesque  phraseology,  which  at 
one  time  threatened  to  drown  all  his  good  qualities,  as  involution 
of  thought  had  threatened  to  drown  them  in  the  Sordello  period. 
But  this  danger  also  was  averted  at  the  last. 

Critical  estimate  of  Browning's  poetry  was  for  years  hampered 
by,  and  cannot  even  yet  be  said  to  have  been  quite  cleared  from, 
the  violent  prepossessions  of  public  opinion  respecting  him. 
For  more  than  a  generation,  in  the  ordinary  sense,  he  was  more 
or  less  passionately  admired  by  a  few  devotees,  stupidly  or  blindly 
ignored  by  the  public  in  general,  and  persistently  sneered  at, 
lectured,  or  simply  disliked  by  the  majority  of  academically 
educated  critics.  The  sharp  revulsion  of  his  later  years  has  been 
noticed ;  and  it  amounted  almost  to  this,  that  while  dislike  to  him 
in  those  who  had  intelligently,  if  somewhat  narrowly,  disapproved 
of  his  ways  was  not  much  affected,  a  Browning  citltus,  almost  as 
blind  as  the  former  pooh-poohing  or  ignoring,  set  in,  and  extended 
from  a  considerable  circle  of  ardent  worshippers  to  the  public  at 
large.  A  "Browning  Society"  was  founded  in  iSSi,  and  received 
from  the  poet  a  kind  of  countenance  which  would  certainly  not 
have  been  extended  to  it  by  most  English  men  of  letters.  During 


VI  ROBERT  BROWNING  273 

his  later  years  handbooks,  solemnly  addressed  to  neophytes  in 
Browningism,  as  if  the  cult  were  a  formal  science  or  art,  appeared 
with  some  frequency;  and  there  has  been  even  a  bulky  Browning 
Cyclopaedia,  which  not  only  expounds  the  more  recondite  (and,  it  is 
fair  to  say,  tolerably  frequent)  allusions  of  the  master,  but  provides 
for  his  disciples  something  to  make  up  for  the  ordinary  classical 
and  other  dictionaries  with  which,  it  seemed  to  be  presumed,  their 
previous  education  would  have  made  them  little  conversant. 

This  not  very  wise  adulation  in  its  turn  not  unnaturally  excited 
a  sort  of  irritation  and  dislike,  to  a  certain  extent  renewing  the 
old  prejudice  in  a  new  form.  To  those  who  could  discard  ex- 
traneous considerations  and  take  Browning  simply  as  he  was, 
he  must,  from  a  period  which  only  very  old  men  can  now  re- 
member, have  always  appeared  a  very  great,  though  also  a  very  far 
from  perfect  poet.  His  imperfections  were  always  on  the  surface, 
though  perhaps  they  were  not  always  confined  to  it ;  and  only 
uncritical  partisanship  could  at  any  time  have  denied  them,  while 
some  of  them  became  noticeably  worse  in  the  period  of  rapid  com- 
position or  publication  from  1870  to  1885.  A  large  license  of 
unconventionally,  and  even  of  defiance  of  convention,  may  be 
claimed  by,  and  should  be  allowed  to,  persons  of  genius  such  as  Mr. 
Browning  undoubtedly  possessed.  But  it  can  hardly  be  denied 
that  he,  like  his  older  contemporary  Carlyle,  whose  example  may 
not  have  been  without  influence  upon  him,  did  set  at  nought  not 
merely  the  traditions,  but  the  sound  norms  and  rules  of  English 
phrase  to  a  rather  unnecessary  extent.  A  beginning  of  deliberate 
provocation  and  challenge,  passing  into  an  after-period  of  more  or 
less  involuntary  persistence  in  an  exaggeration  of  the  mannerisms 
at  first  more  or  less  deliberately  adopted,  is  apt  to  be  shown  by 
persons  who  set  themselves  in  this  way  to  innovate ;  and  it  was 
shown  by  Mr.  Browning.  It  is  impossible  for  any  intelligent 
admirer  to  maintain,  except  as  a  paradox,  that  his  strange  modu- 
lations, his  cacophonies  of  rhythm  and  rhyme,  his  occasional 
adoption  of  the  foreshortened  language  of  the  telegraph  or  the 
comic  stage,  and  many  other  peculiarities  of  his,  were  not  things 

T 


274  TIIK  SECOND  POETICAL  TERIOD  CHAP. 


which  a  more  perfect  art  would  have  either  absorbed  and  trans- 
formed, or  at  least  have  indulged  in  with  far  less  luxuriance.  Noi 
does  it  seem  much  more  reasonable  for  anybody  to  contend  that 
his  fashion  of  soul-dissection  at  a  hand-gallop,  in  drama,  in  mono- 
logue, in  lay  sermon,  was  not  largely,  even  grossly,  abused.  Some- 
times the  thing  was  not  worth  doing  at  all — there  are  at  least  half 
a  dozen  of  the  books  between  The  Ring  and  the  Book  and 
Asolando  from  the  whole  of  which  a  judicious  lover  of  poetry 
would  not  care  to  save  more  than  the  bulk  of  the  smallest  of 
them,  should  they  be  menaced  with  entire  destruction.  Even 
in  the  best  of  these  what  is  good  could  generally,  if  not  always, 
have  been  put  at  the  length  of  the  shorter  Men  and  Women  with 
no  loss,  nay,  with  great  advantage.  The  obscurity  so  much 
talked  of  was  to  some  extent  from  the  very  first,  and  to  the  last 
continued  to  be,  in  varying  degrees,  an  excuse,  or  at  least  an 
occasion,  for  putting  at  great  length  thought  that  was  not  always 
so  far  from  commonplace  as  it  looked  into  expression  which  was 
very  often  not  so  much  original  as  unkempt.  "  Less  matter  with 
more  art "  was  the  demand  which  might  have  been  made  of  Mr. 
Browning  from  first  to  last,  and  with  increasing  instance  as  he 
became  more  popular. 

But  though  no  competent  lover  of  poetry  can  ever  have  denied 
the  truth  and  cogency  of  these  objections,  the  admission  of  them 
can  never,  in  any  competent  lover  of  poetry,  have  obscured  or 
prevented  an  admiration  of  Browning  none  the  less  intense 
because  not  wholly  unreserved.  Even  his  longer  poems,  in 
which  his  faults  were  most  apparent,  possessed  an  individuality 
of  the  first  order,  combined  the  intellectual  with  no  small 
part  of  the  sensual  attraction  of  poetry  after  a  fashion  not  other- 
wise paralleled  in  England  since  Dryden,  and  provided  an 
extraordinary  body  of  poetical  exercise  and  amusement.  The 
pathos,  the  power,  at  times  the  humour,  of  the  singular  soul- 
studies  which  he  was  so  fond  of  projecting  with  little  accessory 
of  background  upon  his  canvas,  could  not  be  denied,  and  have 
not  often  been  excelled.  If  he  was  not  exactly  what  is  commonly 


vi  ROBERT  BROWNING  275 

called  orthodox  in  religion,  and  if  his  philosophy  was  of  a  dis- 
tinctly vague  order,  he  was  always  "  on  the  side  of  the  angels  " 
in  theology,  in  metaphysics,  in  ethics ;  and  his  politics,  if  exceed- 
ingly indistinct  and  unpractical,  were  always  noble  and  generous. 
Further,  though  he  seems  to  have  been  utterly  destitute  of  the 
slightest  gift  of  dramatic  construction,  he  had  no  mean  share  of  a 
much  rarer  gift,  that  of  dramatic  character ;  and  in  a  century  of 
descriptions  of  nature  his,  if  not  the  most  exquisite,  have  a 
freedom  and  truth,  a  largeness  of  outline  combined  with  felicity 
of  colour,  not  elsewhere  to  be  discovered. 

But  it  is  as  a  lyric  poet  that  Browning  ranks  highest ;  and  in 
this  highest  class  it  is  impossible  to  refuse  him  all  but  the  highest 
rank,  in  some  few  cases  the  very  highest.  He  understood  love 
pretty  thoroughly;  and  when  a  lyric  poet  understands  love 
thoroughly  there  is  little  doubt  of  his  position.  But  he  under- 
stood many  other  things  as  well,  and  could  give  strange  and 
delightful  voice  to  them.  Even  his  lyrics,  still  more  his  short 
non-lyrical  poems,  admirable  as  they  often  are,  and  closely  as 
they  group  with  the  lyrics  proper,  are  not  untouched  by  his 
inseparable  defect.  He  cannot  be  prevented  from  inserting 
now  and  then  in  the  midst  of  exquisite  passages  more  or  fewer 
of  his  quirks  and  cranks  of  thought  and  phrase,  of  his 
vernacularly  or  his  euphuism,  of  his  outrageous  rhymes  (which, 
however,  are  seldom  or  never  absolutely  bad),  of  those  fantastic 
tricks  of  his  in  general  which  remind  one  of  nothing  so  much 
as  of  dashing  a  bladder  with  rattling  peas  in  the  reader's  face 
just  at  the  height  of  the  passion  or  the  argument. 

Yet  the  beauty,  the  charm,  the  variety,  the  vigour  of  these 
short  poems  are  as  wonderful  as  the  number  of  them.  He 
never  lost  the  secret  of  them  to  his  latest  years.  The  delicious 
lines  "Never  the  time  and  the  place,  And  the  loved  one 
all  together "  are  late ;  and  there  are  half  a  dozen  pieces  in 
Asolando,  latest  of  all,  which  exhibit  to  the  full  the  almost 
bewildering  beauty  of  combined  sound,  thought,  and  sight,  the 
clash  of  castanets  and  the  thrill  of  flutes,  the  glow  of  flower  and 


276  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

sunset,  the  subtle  appeal  for  sympathy  in  feeling  or  assent  in 
judgment.  The  song  snatches  in  Pippa  Passes,  "Through  the 
Metidja,"  "The  Lost  Leader,"  "In  a  Gondola,"  "Earth's  Im- 
mortalities," "Mesmerism,"  "Women  and  Roses,"  "  Love  Among 
the  Ruins,"  "  A  Toccata  of  Galuppi's,"  "  Prospice,"  "  Rabbi  Ben 
Ezra,"  "  Porphyria's  Lover,"  "  After,"  with  scores  of  others,  and 
the  "  Last  Ride  Together,"  the  poet's  most  perfect  thing,  at  the 
head  of  the  list,  are  such  poems  as  a  very  few — Shakespeare, 
Shelley,  Burns,  Coleridge — may  surpass  now  and  then  in  pure 
lyrical  perfection,  as  Tennyson  may  excel  in  dreamy  ecstasy, 
as  some  seventeenth  century  songsters  may  outgo  in  quaint  and 
perfect  fineness  of  touch,  but  such  as  are  nowhere  to  be  surpassed 
or  equalled  for  a  certain  volume  and  variety  of  appeal,  for  fulness 
of  life  and  thought,  of  action  and  passion. 

Mr.  Browning's  wife,  Elizabeth  Barrett,  was  older  than  himself 
by  six  years,  and  her  period  of  popularity  considerably  anticipated 
his.  But  except  one  very  juvenile  book  she  published  nothing 
of  importance  till  1838,  when  Browning,  whom  she  did  not  then 
know,  had  already  manifested  his  idiosyncrasy.  Miss  Barrett, 
whose  father's  original  name  was  Moulton,  was  born  at  Carlton 
Hall,  Durham,  on  6th  March  1806.  The  change  of  name  was 
brought  on  by  succession  to  estates  in  the  West  Indies ;  and  the 
family  were  wealthy.  For  the  greater  part  of  Miss  Barrett's 
youth  they  lived  in  Herefordshire  at  a  place,  Hope  End,  which 
has  left  great  traces  on  her  early  poetry  ;  later  her  headquarters 
were  in  London,  with  long  excursions  to  Devonshire.  These 
excursions  were  mainly  caused  by  bad  health,  from  which,  as 
well  as  from  family  bereavements,  Miss  Barrett  was  a  great 
sufferer.  She  had  read  widely ;  she  began  to  write  as  a  mere 
child ;  and  her  studies  extended  even  to  Greek,  though  in  a 
rather  amateurish  and  desultory  fashion.  Her  Essay  on  Mind 
and  other  poems  appeared  in  1825  ;  but  a  considerable  interval, 
as  noted  above,  elapsed  before,  in  The  Seraphim  and  other  poems, 
she  gave,  if  not  a  truer,  a  more  characteristic  note.  And  two 
more  intervals  of  exactly  the  same  length  gave  Poems.  1846  and 


VI  MRS.   BROWNING  277 

Poems  1850,  containing  most  of  her  best  work.  Meanwhile 
she  had  met  Robert  Browning,  and  had  married  him,  rather 
against  the  wish  of  her  family,  in  1846.  The  rest  of  her  life  was 
spent  mostly  at  Florence,  where,  in  1849,  the  only  child  of 
the  marriage  was  born.  Two  years  later  appeared  Casa  Guidi 
Windou's  and  the  long  "sociological"  romance  of  Aurora  Leigh. 
In  these,  and  still  more  in  the  Poems  before  Congress  (1860),  a  not 
unnatural  tendency  to  echo  the  peculiar  form  and  spirit  of  her 
husband's  work  is  observable,  not  by  any  means  always  or 
frequently  to  advantage.  She  died  at  Florence  on  3oth  June 
1861,  and  next  year  a  volume  of  Last  Poems  was  issued.  The 
most  interesting  document  in  regard  to  her  since  has  been  her 
Letters  to  R.  H.  Home,  the  author  of  Orion,  which  were  published 
in  1876.  Of  certain  correspondence  between  her  and  her  husband 
published  since,  this  history  prefers  not  to  speak. 

Her  popularity,  we  have  said,  long  anticipated  her  husband's ; 
indeed,  years  after  her  death,  it  was  possible,  and  not  un- 
common, to  meet  persons,  not  uncultivated,  who  were  fairly  well 
acquainted  with  her  verse  and  entirely  ignorant  of  his.  The  case 
has  since  been  altered ;  but  it  is  believed  that  Mrs.  Browning 
still  retains,  and  it  is  probable  that  she  will  always  retain,  no 
small  measure  of  general  favour.  It  has  been  usual  to  speak  of 
her  as  the  chief  English  poetess,  which  she  certainly  is  if  bulk 
and  character  of  work  as  distinguished  from  perfection  of  work- 
manshTp^are  considered.  Otherwise,  she  must  as  certainly  give 
place  to  Miss  Christina  Rossetti.  But  Mrs.  Browning  no  doubt 
combined,  in  very  unusual  and  interesting  manner,  the  qualities 
which  appeal  to  what  may  be  called,  with  no  disdainful  inten- 
tion, the  crowd  of  readers  of  poetry,  and  those  which  appeal 
to  the  elect.  Even  the  peculiarities  which  lent  themselves  so 
easily  to  parody — and  some  of  the  happiest  parodies  ever  written 
were  devoted  to  her  in  Bon  Gaidtier  and  other  books — did  not 
serve  her  badly  with  the  general,  for  a  parody  always  in  a  way 
attracts  attention  to  the  original.  Although  her  expression  was 
not  always  of  the  very  clearest,  its  general  drift  was  never  easily 


278  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

mistakable  ;  and  though  she  was  wont  to  enshrine  her  emotions 
in  something  of~a  mist  of  mysticism,  they  were  in  the  main  simple 
and  human  enough.  It  must  also  be  admitted  that  pathetic 

.  - -•••••••••••     i"i  •  — 

sentiment  is  almost  the  surest  of  popular  appeals  in  poetry ;  and 
Miss  Barrett — partly  through  physical  suffering,  partly  through  the 
bereavements  above  referred  to,  but  very  mainly  it  may  be 
suspected  by  temperament  and  preference — was  much  more  a 
visitant  of  the  House  of  Mourning  than  of  the  House  of  Mirth. 
She  was  yet  again,  profoundly  and  sincerely,  if  a  little  vaguely, 
religious ;  and  her  sacred  poems,  of  which  the  famous  and 
beautiful  "  Cowper's  Grave  "  is  the  chief  example,  secured  one 
portion  of  the  public  to  her  as  firmly  as  the  humanitarianism  of 
"The  Cry  of  the  Children,"  chiming  in  with  famous  things  of 
Hood  and  Dickens,  did  another ;  "  IsobePs  Child,"  a  pathetic 
domesticity,  a  third ;  the  somewhat  gushing  and  undistinguished 
Romanticism  of  "  The  Duchess  May  "  and  "  The  Brown  Rosary," 
a  fourth ;  and  the  ethical  and  political  "  noble  sentiments  "  of 
"  Lady  Geraldine's  Courtship,"  a  fifth. 

But  it  would  argue  gross  unfairness  in  an  advocate,  and  gross 
incompetence  in  a  critic,  to  let  it  be  supposed  that  these  popular 
attractions  were  the  only  ones  that  Mrs.  Browning  possessed. 
Despite  and  besides  the  faults  which  will  be  presently  noticed, 
and  which,  critically  speaking,  are  very  grave  faults,  she  had 
poetical  merits  of  a  very  high  order.  Her  metrical  faculty, 
though  constantly  flawed  and  imperfect,  was  very  original  and" 
full  of  musical  variety.  Although  her  choice  of  words  could  by 
no  means  always  be  commended,  her  supply  of  them  was 
extraordinary.  Before  her  imprisonment  in  sick-rooms  she  had 
pored  on  nature  with  the  eagerest  and  most  observant  eye,  and 
that  imprisonment  itself  only  deepened  the  intensity  of  her 
remembered  nature-worship.  Her  pathos,  if  it  sometimes  over- 
flowed into  gush,  was  quite  unquestionable  in  sincerity  and  most 
powerful  in  appeal ;  her  sentiment  was  always  pure  and  generous  ; 
and  it  is  most  curious  to  see  how  in  the  noble  directness  of  such 
a  piece  as  "  Lord  Walter's  Wife,"  not  only  her  little  faults  of 


vi  MRS.  BROWNING  279 


scnsiblerie,  but  her  errors  of  diction,  are  burnt  and  smelted  out 
by  the  fire  of  the  expressed  impression.  Her  verse -pictures 
— for  instance  those  in  the  "Vision  of  Poets" — vie,  in_beautyTf 
not  in  clearness  of  composition  and  definition,  with  Tennyson's 
own.  The  Romantic  pieces  already  glanced  at,  obnoxious  and 
obvious  as  are  their  defects,  unite  the  pathos  and  the  picturesque- 
ness  just  assigned  to  her  in  a  most  remarkable  manner.  And 
when,  especially  in  the  Sonnet,  she  consented  to  undergo  tfie 
limitations  of  a  form  which  almost  automatically  restrained  her 
voluble  facility,  the  effect  was  often  simply  of  the  first  order. 
Trie  exquisite  "Sonnets  from  the  Portuguese"  (which  are  not 
from  the  Portuguese,  and  are  understood  to  have  been  addressed 
to  Mr.  Browning),  especially  that  glorious  one  beginning — 

If  thou  wilt  love  me,  let  it  be  for  naught 
Except  for  love's  sake  only — 

(which  is  not  far  below  Shakespeare's,  or  the  great  thing  which  was 
published  as  Drayton's),  rank  with  the  noblest  efforts  of  the 
1 6th- 1 7 th  century  in  this  dangerous  form.  And  if  this,  instead 
of  having  to  conform  to  the  requirements  of  a  connected  history, 
were  a  separate  study  of  Mrs.  Browning,  it  would  be  necessary  to 
mention  scores  of  separate  pieces  full  of  varied  beauty. 

But  in  no  poet,  perhaps  not  even  in  Byron,  are  such  great 
beauties  associated  with  such  astonishing  defects  as  in  Mrs. 
Browning, — some  of  these  defects  being  so  disgusting  as  well  as  so 
strange  that  it  requires  not  a  little  critical  detachment  to  put  her, 
on  the  whole,  as  high  as  she  deserves  to  be  put.  Like  almost  all 
women  who  have  written,  she  was  extremely  deficient  in  self- 
criticism,  and  positively  pampered  and  abused  her  natural 
tendency  towards  fluent  volubility.  There  is  hardly  one  of  the 
pieces  named  above,  outside  the  sonnets,  with  the  exception 
certainly  of  "  Lord  Walter's  Wife  "  and  possibly  of  "  Cowper's 
Grave,"  which  would  not  be  immensely  improved  by  compression 
and  curtailment,  "  The  Rhyme  of  the  Duchess  May  ''  being  a 
special  example.  In  other  pieces  not  yet  specified,  such  as  "The 


28o  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

Romaunt  of  Margret,"  "  Bianca  among  the  Nightingales,"  and 
especially  "The  Poet's  Vow,"  the  same  defect  is  painfully  felt. 
That  the  poetess  frequently,  and  especially  in  her  later  poetical  work, 
touches  subjects  which  she  does  not  very  well  comprehend,  and 
which  are  very  doubtfully  suited  for  poetical  treatment  at  all,  is  a  less 
important  because  a  more  controversial  objection  ;  and  the  merits 
of  such  a  book  as  Aurora  Leigh  depend  so  much  upon  the  arguing 
out  of  the  general  question  whether  what  is  practically  a  modern 
novel  has  any  business  to  be  written  in  verse,  that  they  perhaps  can 
receive  no  adequate  treatment  here.  But  as  to  the  fatal  fluency 
of  Mrs.  Browning  there  can  be  no  question  before  any  tribunal 
which  knows  its  own  jurisdiction  and  its  own  code.  And 
that  fluency  extends  to  more  than  length.  The  vocabulary  is 
wilfully  and  tastelessly  unusual, — "abele"  rhymed  "abeel"for 
<vpoplar";  American  forms  such  as  "human"  for  "humanity" 
and  "weaken"  for  a  neuter  verb;  fustianish  words  like  "re- 
boant " ;  awkward  suggestions  of  phrase,  such  as  "  droppings  of 
warm  tears." 

But  all  these  things,  and  others  put  together,  are  not 
so  fatal  as  her  extraordinary  dulness  of  ear  in  the  matter  of 
rhyme.  She  endeavoured  to  defend  her  practice  in  this  respect 
in  the  correspondence  with  Home,  but  it  is  absolutely  inde- 
fensible. What  is  known  as  assonance,  that  is  to  say,  vowel 
rhyme  only,  "as  in  Old  French  and  in  Spanish,  is  not  in  itself 
objectionable,  though  it  is  questionably  suited  to  English.  But 
Mrs.  Browning's  eccentricities  do  not  as  a  rule,  though  they 
sometimes  do,  lie  in  the  direction  of  assonance.  They  are  simply 
bad  and  vulgar  rhymes — rhymes  which  set  the  teeth  on  edge. 
Thus,  when  she  rhymes  "palace"  and  "chalice,"  "evermore" 
and  "emperor,"  "Onora"and  "o'er  her,"  or,  most  appalling  of 
all,  "  mountain  "  and  "  daunting,"  it  is  impossible  not  to  remember 
with  a  shudder  that  every  omnibus  conductor  does  shout  "  Pal/fa," 
that  the  common  Cockney  would  pronounce  it  "Onorer,"  that  the 
vulgar  ear  is  deaf  to  the  difference  between  ore  and  or,  and  that 
it  is  possible  to  find  persons  not  always  of  the  costermonger 


vi  MATTHEW  ARNOLD  281 

class  who  would  make  of  "mountain"  something  very  like 
"mau-unting."  In  other  words,  Mrs.  Browning  deliberately,  or 
lazily,  or  for  want  of  ear,  admits  false  pronunciation  to  save  her 
the  trouble  of  an  exact  rhyme.  Nay,  more,  despite  her  Greek, 
she  will  rhyme  "idyll"  to  "middle,"  and  "pyramidal"  to  "idle," 
though  nothing  can  be  longer  than  the  i  in  the  first  case,  and 
nothing  shorter  than  the  /  in  the  second.  The  positive  anguish 
which  such  hideous  false  notes  as  these  must  cause  to  any  one 
with  a  delicate  ear,  the  maddening  interruption  to  the  delight  of 
these  really  beautiful  pieces  of  poetry,  cannot  be  over-estimated. 
It  is  fair  to  say  that  among  the  later  fruit  of  her  poetical  tree  there 
are  fewer  of  these  Dead  Sea  apples, — her  husband,  who,  though 
audacious,  was  not  vulgar  in  his  rhymes,  may  have  taught  her 
better.  But  to  her  earlier,  more  spontaneous,  and  more  charac- 
teristic verse  they  are  a  most  terrible  drawback,  such  as  no  other 
English  poet  exhibits  or  suffers. 

No  poets  at  all  approaching  the  first  class  can  be  said  to  have 
been  born  within  a  decade  either  way  of  Tennyson  and  Browning, 
though  some  extremely  interesting  writers  of  verse  of  about  the 
same  date  will  have  to  be  noticed  in  the  latter  part  of  this  chapter. 
The  next  year  that  produced  a  poet  almost  if  not  quite  great, 
though  one  of  odd  lapses  and  limitations,  was  1822,  the  birth- 
year  of  Matthew  Arnold.  When  a  writer  has  produced  both 
prose  and  verse,  or  prose  of  distinctly  different  kinds  in  which 
one  division  or  kind  was  very  far  superior  in  intrinsic  value  and 
extrinsic  importance  to  the  others,  it  has  seemed  best  here  to 
notice  all  his  work  together.  But  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Arnold,  as 
in  some  others,  this  is  not  possible,  the  volume,  the  character, 
and  the  influence  of  his  work  in  creative  verse  and  critical  prose 
alike  demanding  separate  treatment  for  the  two  sections.  He 
was  the  eldest  son  of  Dr.  Arnold,  the  famous  headmaster  of 
Rugby,  and  was  educated  first  at  the  two  schools,  Winchester 
and  Rugby  itself,  with  which  his  father  was  connected  as  scholar 
and  master,  and  then  at  Balliol,  where  he  obtained  a  scholarship 
in  1840.  He  took  the  Newdigate  in  1844,  and  was  elected  a  Fellow 


282  THE  SECOND  1'OETICAL  PERIOD 


of  Oriel  in  1845.  After  some  work  as  private  secretary,  he  received 
an  inspectorship  of  schools,  and  held  it  until  nearly  the  time  of  his 
death  in  1888.  He  had  been  Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford  from 
1857  to  1867.  He  published  poetry  early,  and  though  his  fame  at 
this  time  was  never  very  wide,  he  was  known  to  those  interested  in 
poetry,  and  especially  to  Oxford  men,  for  more  than  twenty  years 
before  he  acquired  popularity  as  a  critic,  and  began  the  remarkable 
series  of  prose  works  which  will  be  noticed  in  a  later  chapter.  So 
early  as  1849  he  had  published,  under  the  initial  of  his  surname 
only,  The  Strayed  Reveller,  and  other  Poems ;  but  his  poetical 
building  was  not  securely  founded  until  1853,  when  there  appeared, 
with  a  very  remarkable  preface,  a  collection  of  Poems,  which  was 
certainly  the  best  thing  that  had  been  produced  by  any  one 
younger  than  the  two  masters  already  discussed.  Merope,  which 
followed  in  1858,  was  an  attempt  at  an  English-Greek  drama, 
which,  with  Mr.  Swinburne's  Atalanta  in  Calydon  and  Erechtheus, 
is  perhaps  the  best  of  a  somewhat  mistaken  kind,  for  Shelley's 
Prometheus  Unbound  soars  far  above  the  kind  itself.  Official  duty 
first,  and  the  growing  vogue  of  his  prose-writing  later,  prevented 
Mr.  Arnold  from  issuing  very  many  volumes  of  verse.  But  his 
New  Poems  in  1867  made  important  additions,  and  in  this  way 
and  that  his  poetical  production  reached  by  the  time  of  his  death 
no  inconsiderable  volume — perhaps  five  hundred  pages  averaging 
thirty  lines  each,  or  very  much  more  than  has  made  the  reputation 
of  some  English  poets  of  very  high  rank.  Until  late  in  his  own 
life  the  general  tendency  was  not  to  take  Mr.  Arnold  very 
seriously  as  a  poet ;  and  there  are  still  those  who  reproach  him 
with  too  literary  a  character,  who  find  fault  with  him  as  thin  and 
wanting  in  spontaneity.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  some  who 
not  only  think  him  happier  in  verse  than  in  prose,  but  consider 
him  likely  to  take,  when  the  "firm  perspective  of  the  past"  has 
dispelled  mirages  and  false  estimates,  a  position  very  decidedly  on 
the  right  side  of  the  line  which  divides  the  great  from  the  not 
great. 

Family,   local,  and   personal   reasons  (for  Dr.   Arnold  had  a 


vi  MATTHEW  ARNOLD  283 

house  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  Rydal),  as  well  as  the  strong 
contemporary  set  in  favour  of  Wordsworth  which  prevailed  in  both 
universities  between  1830  and  1845,  caused  Mr.  Arnold  early  to 
take  a  distinctly  Wordsworthian  bent.  He  was,  later,  somewhat 
outspoken  in  his  criticism  of  Wordsworth's  weaker  points  ;Jjnt  it 
is  impossible  for  any  one  to  read  his  own  poems  without  perceiving 
that  Arnold  stands  in  a  line  of  filiation  from  Milton,  with  a  slight 
deviation  by  way  of  Gray,  through  Wordsworth,  though  with  a 
strong  personal  element  in  his  verse.  This  personal  element, 
besides  other  things,  represents  perhaps  more  powerfully  than  it 
represents  anything  else,  and  than  anything  else  represents  this,  a 
certain  reaction  from  the  ornate  and  fluent  Romanticism  of  the 
school  of  Keats  and  Tennyson.  Both,  especially  the  latter, 
influenced  Mr.  Arnold  consciously  and  unconsciously.  But 
consciously  he  was  striving  against  both  to. ..set  up  a  neo-classic 
ideal  as  against  the  Romantic  ;  and  unconsciously  he  was  en- 
deavouring to  express  a  very  decided,  though  a  perhaps  not  entirely 
genial  or  masculine,  personal  temperament.  In  other  words,  Mr. 
Arnold  is  on  one  side  a  poet  of  "  correctness  " — a  new  correctness 
as  different  from  that  of  Pope  as  his  own  time,  character,  and 
cultivation  were  from  Pope's,  but  still  correctness,  that  is  to  say 
a  scheme  of  literature  which  picks  and  chooses  according  to 
standards,  precedents,  systems,  rather  than  one  which,  given  an 
abundant  stream  of  original  music  and  representation,  limits  the 
criticising  province  in  the  main  to  making  the  thing  given  the  best 
possible  of  its  kind.  And  it  is  not  a  little  curious  that  his  own 
work  is  by  no  means  always  the  best  of  its  kind—that  it  would 
often  be  not  a  little  the  better  for  a  stricter  application  of  critical 
rules  to  itself. 

But  when  it  is  at  its  best  it  has  a  wonderful  charm — a  charm 
nowhere  else  to  be  matched  among  our  dead  poets  of  this  century. 
Coleridge  was  perhaps,  allowing  for  the  fifty  years  between  them, 
as  good  a  scholar  as  Mr.  Arnold,  and  he  was  a  greater  poet ;  but 
save  for  a  limited  time  he  never  had  his  faculties  under  due 
command,  or  gave  the  best  of  his  work.  Scott,  Byron,  Keats, 


284  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

were  not  scholars  at  all ;  Shelley  and  Tennyson  not  critical 
scholars ;  Rossetti  a  scholar  only  in  modern  languages.  And 
none  of  these  except  Coleridge,  whatever  their  mere  knowledge 
or  instruction,  had  the  critical  vein,  the  knack  of  comparing  and 
adjusting,  at  all  strongly  developed.  Many  attempts  have  been 
made  at  a  formula  of  which  the  following  words  are  certainly  not 
a  perfect  expression,  that  a  poet  without  criticism  is  a  failure,  and 
that  a  critic  who  is  a  poet  is  a  miracle.  Mr.  Arnold  is  beyond  all 
doubt  the  writer  who  has  most  nearly  combined  the  two  gifts. 
But  for  the  present  we  are  only  concerned  with  his  poetry. 

This  shows  itself  distinctly  enough,  and  perhaps  at  not  far  from 
its  best,  in  almost  his  earliest  work.  Among  this  earliest  is  the 
magnificent  sonnet  on  Shakespeare  which  perhaps  better  deserves 
to  be  set  as  an  epigraph  and  introduction  to  Shakespeare's  own 
work  than  anything  else  in  the  libraries  that  have  been  written 
on  him  except  Dryden's  famous  sentence  ;  "  Mycerinus,"  a  stately 
blending  of  well-arranged  six-lined  stanzas  with  a  splendid  finale 
of  blank  verse  not  quite  un-Tennysonian,  but  slightly  different 
from  Tennyson's  ;  "  The  Church  of  Brou,"  unequal  but  beautiful 
in  the  close  (it  is  a  curious  and  almost  a  characteristic  thing  that 
Matthew  Arnold's  finales,  his  perorations,  were  always  his  best) ; 
"  Requiescat,"  an  exquisite  dirge.  To  this  early  collection,  too, 
belongs  almost  the  whole  of  the  singular  poem  or  collection  of 
poems  called  "  Switzerland,"  a  collection  much  rehandled  in  the 
successive  editions  of  Mr.  Arnold's  work,  and  exceedingly  unequal, 
but  containing,  in  the  piece  which  begins — 

Yes  !  in  the  sea  of  life  enisled, 

one  of  the  noblest  poems  of  its  class  which  the  century  has 
produced;  the  mono-dramatic  "Strayed  Reveller,"  which  as 
mentioned  above  is  one  of  the  very  earliest  of  all ;  and  the  more 
fully  dramatised  and  longer  "  Kmpedocles  on  Etna,"  in  regard  to 
which  Mr.  Arnold  showed  a  singular  vacillation,  issuing  it,  with- 
drawing nearly  all  of  it,  and  then  issuing  it  again.  Its  design, 
like  that  of  the  somewhat  later  '•  Merope,'1  is  not  of  the  happiest,  but 


VI  MATTHEW  ARNOLD  285 

it  contains  some  lyrical  pieces  which  are  among  the  best  known 
and  the  best  of  their  author's  work.  Early,  too,  if  not  of  the 
earliest,  are  certain  longer  narrative  or  semi-narrative  poems,  not 
seldom  varied  with  or  breaking  into  lyric— "  Sohrab  and  Rustum" 
with  another  of  the  fine  closes  referred  to,  perhaps  indeed  the 
finest  of  all;  "The  Sick  King  in  Bokhara";  "Balder  Dead"; 
"Tristram  and  Iseult  " ;  "The  Scholar-Gipsy,"  a  most  admirable 
"poem  of  place,"  being  chiefly  devoted  to  the  country  round 
Oxford;  "Thyrsis"  (an  elegy  on  Clough  which  by  some  is  ranked 
not  far  below  Lycidas  and  Adonais).  But  perhaps  Mr.  Arnold's 
happiest  vein,  like  that  of  most  of  the  poets  of  the  last  two-thirds 
of  the  century,  lay  not  in  long  poems,  but  in  shorter  pieces, 
more  or  less  lyrical  in  form  but  not  precisely  lyrics — in  short  of 
the  same  general  class  (though  differing  often  widely  enough  in 
subject  and  handling)as  those  in  which  the  main  appeal  of  Tennyson 
himself  has  been  said  to  consist.  Such  is  "The  Forsaken  Merman," 
the  poet's  most  original,  and  perhaps  most  charming,  if  not  his 
deepest  or  most  elaborate  thing — a  piece  of  exquisite  and  passionate 
music  modulated  with  art  as  touching  as  it  is  consummate ; 
"  Dover  Beach,"  where  the  peculiar  religious  attitude,  with  the 
expression  of  which  so  much  of  Mr.  Arnold's  prose  is  concerned, 
finds  a  more  restrained  and  a  very  melodious  voice  ;  the  half- 
satiric,  half-meditative  "Bacchanalia";  the  fine  "  Summer  Night"; 
the  Memorial  Verses  (Mr.  Arnold  was  a  frequent  and  a  skilled 
attempter  of  epicedes)  on  Wordsworth,  on  Heine,  and  on  the  dog 
Geist ;  with,  almost  latest  of  all  and  not  least  noble,  "Westminster 
Abbey,"  the  opening  passages  of  which  vie  in  metre  (though  of  a 
more  complicated  mould)  and  in  majesty  with  Milton's  "  Nativity 
Ode,"  and  show  a  wonderful  ability  to  bear  this  heavy  burden  of 
comparison. 

Perhaps  these  last  words  may  not  unfairly  hint  at  a  defect— if 
not  the  defect — of  this  refined,  this  accomplished,  but  this  often 
disappointing  poetry.  Quite  early,  in  the  preface  before  referred 
to,  the  poet  had  run  up,  and  nailed  to  the  mast,  a  flag-theory  of 
poetic  art  to  which  he  always  adhered  as  far  as  theory  went,  and 


286  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

which,  it  may  be  reasonably  supposed,  he  always  endeavoured  to 
exemplify  in  practice.  According  to  this  "all  depends  on  the 
subject,"  and  the  fault  of  most  modern  poetry  and  of  nearly  all 
modern  criticism  is  that  the  poets  strive  to  produce  and  the 
critics  expect  to  receive,  not  an  elaborately  planned  and  adjusted 
treatment  of  a  great  subject,  but  touches  or  bursts  of  more  or 
less  beautiful  thought  and  writing.  Now  of  course  it  need  not  be 
said  that  in  the  very  highest  poetry  the  excellence  of  the  subject, 
the  complete  appropriateness  of  the  treatment,  and  the  beauty  of 
patches  and  passages,  all  meet  together.  But  it  will  also  happen 
that  this  is  not  so.  And  then  the  poet  of  "the  subject"  will 
not  only  miss  the  happy  "jewels  five  words  long,"  the  gracious 
puffs  and  cat's  paws  of  the  wind  of  the  spirit,  that  his  less  austere 
brother  secures,  but  will  not  make  so  very  much  of  his  subjects, 
of  his  schemes  of  treatment  themselves.  His  ambition,  as 
ambition  so  often  does,  will  over-reach  itself,  and  he  will  have 
nothing  to  show  but  the  unfinished  fragments  of  a  poetical 
Escurial,  instead  of  the  finished  chantries  and  altar-tombs  which 
a  less  formal  architect  is  able  to  boast. 

However  this  may  be,  two  things  are  certain,  the  first  that  the 
best  work  of  Matthew  Arnold  in  verse  bears  a  somewhat  small  pro- 
portion to  the  work  that  is  not  his  best,  and  that  his  worst  is 
sometimes  strangely  unworthy  of  him  ;  the  second,  that  the  best 
where  it  appears  is  of  surpassing  charm — uniting  in  a  way,  of  which 
Andrew  Marvell  is  perhaps  the  best  other  example  in  English 
lyric,  romantic  grace,  feeling,  and  music  to  a  classical  and  austere 
precision  of  style,  combining  nobility  of  thought  with  grace  of 
expression,  and  presenting  the  most  characteristically  modern  ideas 
of  his  own  particular  day  with  an  almost  perfect  freedom  from 
the  jargon  of  that  day,  and  in  a  key  always  suggesting  the  great 
masters,  the  great  thinkers,  the  great  poets  of  the  past.  To  those 
who  are  in  sympathy  with  his  own  way  of  thinking  he  must  always 
possess  an  extraordinary  attraction  ;  perhaps  he  is  not  least,  though 
he  may  be  more  discriminatingly,  admired  by  those  who  are  very 
much  out  of  sympathy  with  him  on  not  a  few  points  of  subject,  but 


PR^E-RAPIIAELITISM  287 


who  are  one  with  him  in  the  Humanities — in  the  sense  and  the  love 
of  the  great  things  in  literature. 

The  natural  and  logical  line  of  development,  however,  from 
the  originators  of  the  Romantic  movement  through  Keats  and 
Tennyson  did  not  lie  through  Matthew  Arnold ;  and  the  time 
was  not  yet  ripe — it  can,  perhaps,  hardly  be  said  to  be  ripe  yet — 
for  a  reaction  in  his  sense.  He  was,  as  has  been  said,  a  branch 
from  Wordsworth,  only  slightly  influenced  by  Tennyson  himself, 
than  whom  indeed  he  was  not  so  very  much  younger.  The  direct 
male  line  of  descent  lay  in  another  direction ;  and  its  next  most 
important  stage  was  determined  by  the  same  causes  which  almost 
at  the  middle  of  the  century  or  a  little  before  brought  about  Prae- 
Raphaelitism  in  art.  Both  of  these  were  closely  connected  with 
the  set  of  events  called  the  Oxford  Movement,  about  which  much 
has  been  written,  but  of  which  the  far-reaching  significance,  not 
merely  in  religion,  but  in  literature,  politics,  art,  and  almost 
things  in  general,  has  never  yet  been  fully  estimated.  As  far  as 
literature  is  concerned,  and  this  special  part  of  literature  with 
which  we  are  here  dealing,  this  movement  had  partly  shown 
and  partly  shaped  the  direction  of  the  best  minds  towards  the 
Middle  Ages,  which  had  been  begun  by  Percy's  Reliques  in  a 
vague  and  blind  sort  of  way,  and  which  had  been  strengthened, 
directed,  but  still  not  altogether  fashioned  according  to  knowledge, 
by  Scott  and  Coleridge. 

This  movement,  which  dominates  the  whole  English  poetry  of 
the  later  half  of  the  century,  with  the  exception  of  that  produced 
by  a  few  survivors  of  the  older  time,  and  to  which  no  successor 
of  equal  brilliancy  and  fertility  made  its  appearance  up  to  the  end 
of  the  century,  was  headed  by  three  writers,  two  of  them,  Rossetti 
and  Mr.  William  Morris,  now  dead ;  one  of  them,  Mr.  Swinburne, 
still  alive,  and,  let  us  hope,  long  to  be  so.  When  this  book  was 
first  published,  Mr.  Morris  was  alive  also ;  and  no  living  writer, 
except  Mr.  Ruskin,  was  admitted  to  these  pages.  But  now  Mr. 
Ruskin  has  left  us,  and  it  has  seemed  that  it  might  not  be  im- 
pertinent to  substitute  Mr.  Swinburne  in  his  place,  with  at  least 


288  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

one  brilliant  living  representative  of  prose  to  keep  him  company 
later  in  the  person  of  Mr.  Meredith,  so  that  at  the  close  of  the 
nineteenth  century  we  may  give  as  complete  an  account  as  is 
possible  of  its  special  literature. 

Gabriel  Charles  Dante  Rossetti,  generally  known  as  Dante 
Gabriel  Rossetti,  was  born  in  London  on  i2th  May  1828.  He 
was  the  son  of  an  Italian  poet  and  critic  of  eminence,  who,  like 
so  many  of  his  countrymen  of  literary  tastes  during  the  early 
part  of  the  century,  had  fallen  into  the  Carbonaro  movement, 
and  who  had  to  fly  first  to  Malta  and  then  to  England.  Here 
he  married  Miss  Polidori,  whose  mother  was  an  Englishwoman ; 
and  his  four  children — the  two  exquisite  poets  below  dealt  with, 
Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti,  a  competent  critic,  and  Maria  Francesca, 
the  eldest  daughter,  who  wrote  an  excellent  introduction  to 
Dante — all  made  contributions,  and  two  of  them  great  contri- 
butions, to  English  literature.  The  father  himself,  who  was 
Professor  of  Italian  at  King's  College,  London,  was  an  en- 
thusiastic though  rather  a  fantastic  Dantist,  and  somewhat  of 
a  visionary  generally,  with  wild  notions  about  mediaeval  secret 
societies,  but  a  man  of  the  greatest  honesty  and  honour,  and  a 
brilliant  contrast  to  the  various  patriot  -  charlatans,  from  Ugo 
Foscolo  downwards,  who  brought  discredit  on  the  Italian  name 
in  his  time  in  England.  These  particulars,  of  a  kind  seldom 
given  in  this  book,  are  not  otiose ;  for  they  have  much  to  do 
with  the  singular  personality  of  our  English  Rossetti  himself. 

He  was  educated  at  King's  College  School ;  but  his  leanings 
towards  art  were  so  strong  that  at  the  age  of  fifteen  he  began  the 
study  of  it,  leaving  school  to  draw  at  the  Royal  Academy  and 
elsewhere.  His  art  career  and  the  formation  of  the  P.R.B. 
(Pra3- Raphaelite  Brotherhood),  unfortunately,  fall  outside  our 
sphere.  It  is  enough  to  say  that  for  some  twenty  years  Rossetti, 
if  he  was  known  at  all  (and  he  was  never  known  very  widely  nor 
did  he  ever  seek  notoriety),  was  known  as  a  painter  only,  though 
many  who  only  knew  his  poems  later  conceived  the  most 
passionate  admiration  for  his  painting.  Yet  he  wrote  almost  as 


vi  ROSSETTI  289 

early  as  he  painted,  contributing  to  the  famous  Prse-Raphaelite 
magazine,  the  Germ,  in  1850,  to  the  remarkable  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  Magazine,  which  also  saw  the  early  work  of  Mr. 
Morris  in  1856,  and  publishing  some  translations  from  The  Early 
Italian  Poets  in  1861.  He  had  married  the  year  before  this  last 
date,  and  was  about  to  publish  Poems  which  he  had  been  writing 
from  an  early  age.  But  his  wife  died  in  1862,  and  in  a  fit  of 
despair  he  buried  his  MSS.  in  her  coffin.  They  were  years  after- 
wards exhumed  and  the  Poems  appeared  in  1870.  Eleven  years 
later  another  volume  of  Ballads  and  Sonnets  was  published,  and 
Rossetti,  whose  health  in  the  interval  had  been  much  shattered, 
and  who  had  unfortunately  sought  refuge  from  insomnia  in 
chloral,  died  next  year  in  April  1882.  The  last  years  of  his 
life  were  not  happy,  and  he  was  most  unnecessarily  affected  by 
attacks  on  the  first  arrangement  of  his  Poems. 

These  poems  had  a  certain  advantage  in  being  presented  to  a 
public  already  acquainted  with  the  work  of  Mr.  Morris  and  Mr. 
Swinburne ;  but  Rossetti  was  not  merely  older  than  his  two 
friends,  he  was  also  to  some  extent  their  master.  At  the  same 
time  the  influences  which  acted  on  him  were  naturally  diverse 
from  those  which,  independently  of  his  own  influence,  acted  on 
them.  For  the  French  and  English  mediaeval  inspirations  of 
Mr.  Morris,  for  the  classical  and  general  study  of  Mr.  Swinburne, 
he  had  his  ancestral  Italians  almost  for  sole  teachers ;  and  for 
their  varied  interests  he  had  his  own  art  of  painting  for  a  con- 
tinual companion,  reminder,  and  model.  Yet  the  mediseval 
impulse  is  almost  equally  strong  on  all  three,  and  its  intensity 
shows  that  it  was  the  real  dominant  of  the  moment  in  English 
poetry.  The  opening  poem  of  Rossetti's  first  book,  "The 
Blessed  Damozel,"  which  is  understood  to  have  been  written 
very  early,  though  afterwards  wrought  up  by  touches  both  of 
his  love  for  his  wife  while  living  and  of  his  regret  for  her  when 
dead,  is  almost  a  typical  example  of  the  whole  style  and  school, 
though  it  is  individualised  by  the  strong  pictorial  element  rarely 
absent  from  his  work.  The  "Blessed  Damozel"  herself,  who 

u 


2go  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

"leaned  out  From  the  gold  Bar  of  Heaven,"  is  a  figure  from  the 
Paradiso,  divested  of  the  excessive  abstraction  of  that  part  of 
Dante,  and  clothed  partly  in  the  gayer  colours  and  more  fleshly 
personality  of  English  and  French  medisevalism,  partly  in  a  mystical 
halo  which  is  peculiar  to  these  nineteenth  century  re-creations  of 
mediaeval  thought  and  feeling.  The  poem  is  of  extreme  beauty, 
and  ornate  as  is  its  language  in  parts  there  are  touches,  such  as 
the  poet's  reflection 

To  one  it  is  ten  years  of  years, 

which  utter  the  simplest  truth  and  tenderness ;  while  others,  such 
as  the  enumeration  of  the  Virgin's  handmaidens  (over  which  at 
the  time  the  hoofs  of  earless  critics  danced) — 

With  her  five  handmaidens,  whose  names 
Are  five  sweet  symphonies — ' 
Cecily,  Gertrude,  Magdalen, 
Margaret  and  Rosalys — 

are  consummate  triumphs  of  the  word -music  brought  by 
Tennyson  into  English  poetry.  Indeed  this  couplet  of  names 
might  be  made  a  sort  of  text  to  expound  the  great  appeal  to  the 
ear  of  this  kind  of  poetry,  which  any  one  who  is  deaf  to  the 
exceptional  and  golden  harmony  of  the  arrangement  need  never 
hope  to  appreciate.  It  is  perfectly  easy  to  change  the  order  in 
many  ways  without  affecting  the  verse  ;  there  is  absolutely  none  of 
these  combinations  which  approaches  the  actual  one  in  beauty 
of  sound  and  suggestion. 

"  Love's  Nocturn  "  which  follows  is  more  of  the  early  Italian 
school  pure  and  simple  ;  and  "  Troy  Town,"  a  ballad  with  burdens, 
is  one  of  a  class  of  poem  much  affected  by  Rossetti  and  ever 
since,  a  class  containing  some  admirable  work,  but  perhaps 
a  little  open  to  the  charge  of  too  deliberate  archaism.  It  is  at  any 
rate  far  inferior  to  his  own  "Sister  Helen."  But  "The  Burden 
of  Nineveh "  which  follows  is  in  a  quite  different  style,  and 
besides  its  intrinsic  excellence  is  noteworthy  as  showing  how  very 
far  Rossetti  was  from  being  limited  in  his  choice  of  manners. 
But  to  go  through  the  whole  contents  of  this  very  remarkable 


vi  ROSSETTI  291 

volume  would  be  impossible,  and  we  can  only  particularise  the 
great  sonnet-sequence  "The  House  of  Life"  (which  was  attacked  for 
want  of  decency  with  as  little  intelligence  as  "The  Blessed  Damozel" 
had  been  attacked  for  want  of  sense),  and  a  set  "for  pictures." 
The  first,  somewhat  thorny  and  obscure  in  language,  is  of  ex- 
treme poetical  and  philosophical  beauty.  The  latter,  beautiful 
enough,  may  be  said  to  lend  itself  a  little  to  the  attacks  of  those 
critics  who  charged  Rossetti  with,  in  the  Aristotelian  phrase, 
"shifting  his  ground  to  another  kind,"  or  (to  vary  the  words) 
of  taking  the  quotation  ut  pictura  poesis  in  too  literal  a  sense. 
Some  songs,  especially  "Penumbra"  and  "The  Woodspurge,"  of 
intense  sweetness  and  sadness,  were  also  included;  and  the 
simple  directness  of  "  Jenny  "  showed,  like  "  Nineveh,"  capacities 
in  the  poet  not  easily  to  be  inferred  from  the  bulk  of  his  poems. 

Rossetti's  second  volume,  while  it  added  only  too  little  to  the 
bulk  of  his  work — for  much  of  it  consisted  of  a  revised  issue  of 
"  The  House  of  Life  " — added  greatly  to  its  enjoyment.  But  it 
produced  no  new  kind,  unless  certain  extensions  of  the  ballad- 
scheme  into  narrative  poems  of  considerable  length  —  "  Rose- 
Mary,"  "The  White  Ship,"  and  "The  King's  Tragedy"— be 
counted  as  such.  "  Rose-Mary  "  in  particular  exhibits  the  merits 
and  defects  of  the  poet  in  almost  the  clearest  possible  light,  and 
it  may  be  safely  said  that  no  English  poet,  not  the  very  greatest, 
need  have  been  ashamed  of  such  a  stanza  as  this,  where  there  is  no 
affectation  worth  speaking  of,  where  the  eternal  and  immortal 
commonplaces  of  poetry  are  touched  to  newness  as  only  a  master 
touches,  and  where  the  turn  of  the  phrase  and  verse  is  im- 
peccable and  supreme : — 

And  lo !  on  the  ground  Rose-Mary  lay, 
With  a  cold  brow  like  the  snows  ere  May, 
With  a  cold  breast  like  the  earth  till  Spring — 
With  such  a  smile  as  the  June  days  bring 
When  the  year  grows  warm  for  harvesting 

William  Morris,  who,  like  their  still  younger  friend  Mr.  Swinburne, 
published  books  of  poetry  some  years  before  Rossetti,  was  born 


292  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

six  years  later  than  the  author  of  "The  Blessed  Damozel,"  in 
1834.  He  was  the  eldest  son  of  a  merchant  who,  well-to-do 
already,  became  rich  by  an  almost  involuntary  investment  in  the 
copper  Eldorado  of  the  Devon  Great  Consols,  the  one -pound 
shares  of  which  were  long  quoted  at  ,£400  ;  he  was  educated  at 
Marlborough,  and  at  Exeter  College,  Oxford,  and  he  promoted  art 
(and  being  a  good  man  of  business,  did  not  lose  wealth)  by 
founding  later  the  renowned  firm  of  Morris  and  Marshall,  whence, 
and  whence  only  in  England  for  many  years,  the  lovers  of  a 
House  Beautiful  could  furnish  it.  Morris  was  a  prime  mover  in, 
and  a  great  contributor  to,  The  Oxford  and  Cambridge  Magazine, 
and,  as  still  a  very  young  man,  he  published  in  1858  the  manifesto 
and  justification  of  the  Prae-Raphaelite  school  in  poetry,  The 
Defence  of  Guenevere  and  other  Poems.  This  had  for  some  time 
the  third  of  the  fates  that  attend  really  great  books.  It  was  not, 
as  they  sometimes  though  seldom  are,  rapturously  welcomed ;  it 
was  not,  as  they  much  more  often  are,  ignorantly  or  rancorously 
attacked ;  it  was  simply  let  alone.  But  it  found,  by  little  and 
little,  its  audience — fit,  though  certainly  few  at  first.  The  beauty 
of  it  is  extraordinary.  The  author  had  gone  straight  to  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  to  that  part  of  the  Middle  Ages  which,  though  still  un- 
adulterated, is  most  in  touch  with  modern  times,  the  period  of 
Mandeville  and  Malory,  of  Thomas  Chester  and  the  English 
Gesta  Romanorum.  He  had  transversed  its  stores  in  a  half- 
borrowed,  half-original  dialect  of  language,  and  had  infused  them 
with  an  almost  entirely  original  kind  of  poetry,  full  of  elfin  music 
and  suffused  with  ghostly  light.  To  some  readers,  at  any  rate,  whom 
the  gods  have  made  fairly  critical  it  seems,  after  nearly  forty  years' 
acquaintanceship,  that  "The  Chapel  in  Lyonesse,"  "  Rapunzel," 
"The  Wind,"  "The  Blue  Closet,"  and  other  things,  are  absolutely 
secure  of  literary  life  in  their  own  division. 

The  Defence  had  anticipated  its  public,  as  the  true  epoch- 
making  book  almost  always  does ;  but,  as  always,  the  public 
gathered  in  its  wake.  When  Mr.  Morris's  next  book,  The  Life 
and  Death  of  Jason,  appeared,  in  1866,  it  was  warmly  welcomed: 


vi  MORRIS  293 

and  though,  save  in  one  or  two  lyrics,  there  was  hardly  in  it  any- 
thing so  fine  as  the  best  things  of  its  predecessor,  the  range  and 
command  of  theme,  which  usually  impress  readers,  were  greater, 
the  theme  itself  was  more  familiar,  and  the  medium — a  singularly 
attractive  form  of  decasyllabic  couplet  imitated  slightly,  through 
Keats,  from  seventeenth  century  writers  like  Browne,  but  originally 
managed — was  sure  to  please  any  fit  and  fairly  prepared  ear.  A 
much  shorter  interval  passed  before  the  poet's  magnum  opus,  The 
Earthly  Paradise,  appeared  in  four  volumes  between  1868  and 
1870.  Here  he  had  mingled  classical  and  mediaeval  subjects, 
decasyllabic  couplets,  octosyllabic  couplets,  and  stanzas  with  a 
freedom  as  felicitous  as  it  was  daring ;  and  there  was  something 
for  almost  all  tastes,  while  happy  tastes  might  like  the  whole.  It 
consisted  of  four-and-twenty  stories,  two  for  each  month,  arranged 
in  the  framework  of  another  story  telling  how  certain  Norse 
wanderers  in  the  time  of  Edward  III.  set  out  westwards  over  the 
Atlantic,  and  after  adventures  with  strange  inhabitants,  fell  in  with 
the  descendants  of  an  old  Greek  colony.  This  lent  itself  happily 
to  the  contrasts  above  noted,  and  "The  Lovers  of  Gudrun,"  the 
Perseus  stories,  "The  Ring  given  to  Venus,"  "  The  Hill  of  Venus," 
"  The  Watching  of  the  Falcon,"  "  The  Man  who  never  Laughed 
Again,"  and  others,  indeed  almost  all,  can  be  read  with  unceasing 
delight. 

Three  years  later,  in  1873,  the  experiment  of  Love  is  Enough — 
a  poem  remote  in  scheme  (it  is  a  kind  of  mystery-interlude),  un- 
familiar in  prosody,  and  only  sometimes  breaking  into  exquisite 
and  generally  intelligible  passage  and  phrase — was  less  successful ; 
but  a  few  years  later  again,  in  1877,  Sigurd  the  Volsung,  a  splendid 
saga  in  anapaestic  trimeters  with  a  strong  middle  pause  and  over- 
flow, once  more  illustrated  Mr.  Morris's  wonderful  command  of 
narrative  verse ;  and  several  later  books  (the  best  of  them,  Poems 
by  the  Way,  in  1891),  with  constant  verse  insertions  in  others  to 
be  mentioned,  showed  that  he  had  never  lost  command  of  the 
greater  harmony. 

He  had,  however,  in  the  Magazine  begun  with  prose  romances 


294  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

— somewhat  Scandinavian  in  style — and  had  given  proofs  of  his 
affection  for  this  form  in  translations  of  the  Grettis  and  Volsunga 
Sagas  and  others.  Latterly  he  took  by  preference  to  original 
work  in  this  kind,  and  produced  during  the  last  seven  years  of  his 
life,  or  posthumously,  seven  romances,  shorter  and  longer,  which 
(whatever  their  drawbacks  of  archaic  and  artificial  style  to  some 
tastes  not  perhaps  of  the  happiest)  are  possessed  of  peculiar  charm. 
They  are  The  House  of  the  Wolfings  (1889),  which  contains  his 
last  very  great  piece  of  verse  ;  The  Roots  of  the  Mountains  (1890), 
a  really  interesting  story;  The  Story  of  the  Glittering  Plain  (1891), 
the  dreamiest ;  The  Wood  beyond  the  World  (1894),  the  least  good, 
though  still  good;  The  Well  at  the  World's  End  (1896),  of 
wonderful  attraction  in  parts,  and  with  more  character  than  most ; 
The  Water  of  the  Wondrous  Isles  (1897),  something  of  a  declen- 
sion ;  and  The  Sundering  Flood (i^ 8),  a  rise  once  more.  During 
these  last  years,  and  up  to  his  death  in  1896,  he  was  much  occupied 
with  his  private  Kelmscott  Press,  which  issued  work  of  unusual 
beauty  in  the  craft. 

The  curious  and  unfamiliar  poignancy  of  Mr.  Morris's  appeal, 
manifested  forty  years  earlier  in  The  Defence,  shows  itself  hardly 
altered  in  his  last  book.  It  directly  hits  not  perhaps  so  very  many; 
it  seems  to  fail  of  its  effect  with  some  by  repetition  ;  but  to  those 
who  are  in  right  case  for  it,  it  is  almost  unfailingly  attractive,  and 
not  in  the  least  staled  by  custom.  In  concentration  of  passion 
and  in  mastery  of  form  Morris  is  below  Rossetti,  but  no  other 
epithets  of  inferiority  attach  to  his  work.  Not  merely  in  that 
appreciation  of  mediaeval  thought  and  art  the  recovery  of  which 
has  been  one  of  the  chief  gains  and  glories  of  the  century,  but 
in  original  production  of  charm  like  to,  but  not  borrowed  from,  the 
mediaeval,  he  has  had,  and  is  likely  to  have,  no  superior.  We 
must  walk  in  the  ways  of  his  garden  if  we  wish  to  gather  the  fresh- 
struck  and  new-raised  rose  of  Lorris,  must  follow  his  quests  to  win 
the  Elf-Queen  with  this  Launfal  of  later  days,  and  borrow  his 
magic  in  order  to  cheat  ourselves  delightfully  in  literature  with 
no  vulgar  copy  of  the  Earthly  Paradise. 


vi  MR.  SWINBURNE  295 

Mr.  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne,  the  youngest  of  the  three, 
was  born  in  1837,  his  father  being  a  cadet  of  a  famous  Border 
family  in  Northumberland,  and  his  mother,  Lady  Jane  Ashburnham, 
of  a  house  celebrated  in  the  seventeenth  century  for  loyalty,  and 
in  the  nineteenth  for  the  collection  (and  dispersion)  of  a  magnificent 
library.  He  was  educated  at  Eton  and  Balliol,  but  took  no  degree, 
and  was  much  in  France  during  his  youth.  His  first  book,  con- 
taining two  plays,  The  Queen- Mother  and  Rosamond,  appeared 
shortly  after  The  Defence  of  Guenevere  in  1 860-61,  and  was  even  less 
read  than  The  Defence  itself.  Nor  did  it,  like  that  book,  gain 
much  by  the  author's  subsequent  advance.  It  is,  in  fact,  though 
perfectly  characteristic  as  one  looks  back  on  it,  not  sufficiently 
decided  in  its  characterisation  to  attract  as  a  new-comer  much 
notice  from  the  reviewer,  unless  that  reviewer  happened  to  be 
more  wide-awake  than  most  were,  till  Mr.  Swinburne  and  his 
friends  had  themselves  roused  criticism  from  its  mid-century 
lethargy.  There  is,  in  addition  to,  and  even  in  place  of,  Mr. 
Morris's  mediaeval  or  fifteenth-century  inspiration  a  much  stronger 
influence  from  the  Elizabethan  drama,  minor  as  well  as  major, 
with  something  also  from  the  eccentrics  of  the  nineteenth-century 
transition — Beddoes,  Darley,  Wells — and  a  good  deal  that  is  quite 
original,  but  as  yet  insufficiently  accomplished.  The  lyric,  of 
which  there  is  not  much,  inclines  to  French  and  Latin  (Mr. 
Swinburne  has  always  been  great  at  polyglot  verse)  rather  than 
to  English ;  and  the  blank  verse,  though  already  powerful  and 
free,  has  not  yet  reached  its  full  power,  and  foreshadows  some- 
thing of  the  over-fluency  with  which  its  author  has  been  charged. 
One  would  like  to  have  been  old  enough  to  receive  the  book  for 
review  at  its  first  appearance ;  it  would  have  been  something  of 
a  test — much  more  so  than  The  Defence  of  Guejicvere,  which  ought 
not  to  have  been  mistaken  or  overlooked  by  any  competent 
critic.  As  a  fact,  very  few  people  read  The  Queen-Mother  volume 
till  their  attention  was  called  to  it  by  Atalanta  in  Calydon,  which 
appeared  in  the  winter  of  1864-65,  and  made  its  mark  at  once. 
The  magnificent  choruses— -of  which  the  best  known,  "Before 


296  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


the  beginning  of  years,"  is  only,  and  but  by  a  little,  the  best — 
caught  the  ear  and  the  imagination  of  all  youthful  lovers  of  poetry 
at  once,  and  have  never  lost  hold  with  some.  The  new  poet  had, 
as  regards  Tennyson  (who  was  at  the  summit  of  his  popularity) 
and  Browning  (who  was  at  last  approaching  it),  the  advantage,  in 
the  former  case  of  substituting  a  rapid  and  sweeping  melody  for 
the  slow  music  of  the  author  of  the  Lotos  Eaters,  in  the  latter  of 
being  perfectly  melodious.  He  lost  no  time.  Atalanta,  at  first 
published  in  a  rather  luxurious  form  (which  has  become  rare 
and  very  costly),  was  quickly  reprinted,  and  almost  as  quickly,  in 
1866,  followed,  first  by  Chastelard,  a  play  on  the  unlucky  lover  01 
Queen  Mary,  and  then,  in  the  autumn  of  the  year,  by  Poems  and 
Ballads,  a  volume  of  miscellaneous  and  chiefly  lyrical  poetry. 
The  merits  of  Chastelard  were  a  little  too  soon  thrown  into  the 
shade  by  the  success  (both  of  scandal  and  otherwise)  of  Poems  and 
Ballads,  but  they  are  very  great.  The  blank  verse  has  far  more 
fire  and  life  than  that  of  Atalanta,  and  the  subject  discouraged 
instead  of  encouraging  that  stichomythia  which  is  so  effective  in 
Greek  and  so  irritating  in  English.  The  beauty  of  the  French 
verses,  "  Le  Navire  "  and  "  Apres  tant  de  jours  "  (which  no  poet 
even  of  that  great  time  of  French  poetry  need  have  disavowed), 
was  surpassed  by  the  English  song,  "  Between  the  sunset  and  the 
sea,"  a  perfectly  wonderful  thing,  as  fresh  now  as  the  day  it  was 
written — the  echoes  of  its  phrase  positively  quivering  with  passion, 
and  shaking  cascades  of  poetic  colour  and  light  and  sound  from 
every  stanza. 

More  probably  by  coincidence  than  for  any  logically  assign- 
able reason,  Mr.  Swinburne  now  fell  in  with  one  of  those  squalls 
of  sudden  prudery  which  have  diversified  the  moral  history  of  a 
country  at  other  times  quite  content  to  bear  Restoration  comedy 
for  thirty  years  without  a  protest,  to  give  almost  the  fullest 
reasonable  freedom  to  novelists  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and 
not  to  refuse  freedom  a  good  deal  more  than  reasonable,  since 
the  very  time  of  which  we  are  speaking,  to  certain  novelists  and 
dramatists  of  the  indecent.  Already  Mrs.  Grundy  had  been  made 


vi  MR.   SWINBURNE  297 

uneasy  by  Chastelard ;  she  was  horrified  by  Poems  and  Ballads. 
Its  first  publisher  threw  up  the  charge,  which  was  transferred  to 
another.  It  was  attacked,  defended,  sought  after  by  some  and 
eschewed  by  others  for  its  supposed  delinquencies,  cherished  by 
the  wise  for  its  real  merits.  These  merits  (which  were  not  un- 
chequered)  finally  posed  Mr.  Swinburne  as  theThirdPoet  of  the  later 
English  nineteenth  century.  It  could  hardly,  in  face  of  this  his 
fourth  volume,  and  of  the  fact  that  he  was  now  in  his  thirtieth  year, 
be  denied  that  he  had  certain  poetic  faults,  which  were  perhaps  likely 
to  increase — the  chief  of  them  all  being  a  tendency  to  excessive 
wordiness,  not  unmusical,  not  even  tedious,  but  failing  to  carry 
the  poem  or  the  reader  any  farther — that  he  was  too  fond  of  certain 
epithets  and  images,  that  he  was  violent  and  excessive  in  some 
departments  of  thought  and  expression 

But  for  the  understanding  lover  of  poetry  the  defects  were  as 
nothing  to  the  merits,  shown  as  before  especially  in  the  department 
of  lyric.  Many  poets  have  been  successful  in  this  or  that  metrical 
form,  unsuccessful  in  others ;  to  Mr.  Swinburne  no  lyrical  measure 
seemed  to  offer  the  slightest  difficulties.  He  could  "  flood  with 
eddying  song  "  alike  elaborate  canzonic  structures,  stately  stanzas 
like  that  of  "  The  Triumph  of  Time  "  ;  the  difficult  quatrain,  as  in 
"Laus  Veneris":  ballad  measure;  refrain -pieces ;  light,  trilling 
movements,  like  "A  Match";  the  Alexandrine  split  into  eights 
and  fours,  like  "  Faustine."  It  would  be  difficult  to  find  any 
corresponding  masterpiece  to  the  triple  triumph  in  sequence  of 
"  Dolores,"  with  its  peculiar  rocking  rhythm  altered  from  Praed, 
of  the  dreamy  languor  of  "The  Garden  of  Proserpine,"  and  of 
the  magnificent  sweeping  anapaests,  arranged  in  a  sort  of  lengthened 
analogue  to  the  elegiac  couplet,  of  Hesperia.  Nor  could  any  one 
say  that  this  was  mere  metre ;  poetic  imagery,  poetic  colour,  fancy, 
light,  sound  were  everywhere. 

After  this  remarkable  book  Mr.  Swinburne  was,  we  have  said, 
classed  and  judged  by  good  wits ;  but  he  continued  for  many  years 
to  repeat  and  vary  his  diploma-pieces,  and  among  the  many  books 
he  has  issued  (A  Song  of  Italy,  1867  ;  Songs  before  Sunrise,  1871  : 


298  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


Bothwell,  1874;  Erechthcus,  1875;  Songs  of  Two  Nations,  1876; 
Poems  and  Ballads  (second  series),  1878;  Songs  of  the  Spring- 
tides, 1880  ;  Mary  Stuart,  1881  ;  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,  1882  ; 
A  Century  of  Roundels,  1883;  A  Midsummer  Holiday,  1884: 
Locrine,  1887;  Poems  and  Ballads  (third  series),  1889;  The 
Sisters,  1892;  A  strophe!  and  Other  Poems,  1894;  A  Tale  of  Balen, 
1896;  Rosamond,  1900)  not  one  has  failed  to  contain  something, 
hardly  one  has  not  contained  many  things,  to  show  his  power. 
Probably  the  best  of  all  these  is  the  second  series  of  Poems  and 
Ballads.  The  contents  of  this  are  unusually  varied,  and  there 
is  perhaps  no  single  volume  —  not  even  the  original  of  the 
same  name — which  exhibits  the  author  at  a  more  constantly  sus- 
tained level  of  power.  One  piece  in  particular,  "  At  a  Month's 
End,"  might  serve  as  the  best  of  all  texts  for  the  exposition  and 
exemplification  of  that  metrical  faculty  which  has  been  noticed 
above,  with  especial  reference  to  its  employment,  not  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  meaning,  but  as  fashioning  poetic  body  for  the  mean- 
ing's soul.  The  measure  is,  reduced  to  its  simplest  terms,  only 
octosyllabic  "eights,"  one  of  the  commonest  of  English  rhythms. 
But  Mr.  Swinburne,  by  two  refinements,  has  secured  for  it  at  once 
variety  and  individuality.  The  first  is  the  adoption  in  the  first 
and  third  lines  of  the  extra  syllable,  giving  feminine  or  double 
rhyme ;  the  second  the  employment,  with  equal  cunning  and 
felicity,  of  that  principle  of  "equivalence,"  or  constant  substitu- 
tion of  trisyllabic  for  disyllabic  feet  and  of  trochee  for  iambus, 
which  is  the  central  secret  and  triumph  of  developed  English 
prosody.  The  stanza 

As  a  star  feels  the  sun  and  falters, 

Touched  to  death  by  diviner  eyes, 
As  on  the  old  gods'  untended  altars 

The  old  fire  of  withered  worship  dies. 


or  even  the  couplet 


For  the  unlit  shrine  is  hardly  lonely 
As  one  the  old  fire  forgets  to  touch, 


MR.  SWINBURNE  299 


with  the  earlier  descriptions  of  the  night  and  the  sea  and  the  iron 
clash  and  clang  of  the  tide  on  the  shore,  and  the  later  contrasts 
of  panther  and  sea-mew,  illustrate,  almost  as  well  as  anything  that 
could  be  cited  from  any  poet,  the  power  of  verse  and  phrase  and 
image  to  make  poetry — to  put  the  thing  poeticamente — as  a  great 
Italian  critic  of  the  sixteenth  century  was  almost  the  first  boldly 
to  say. 

The  earlier  Songs  before  Sunrise,  a  little  violent  in  sentiment 
and  uneven  in  execution,  had  contained  a  magnificent  overture- 
piece  or  prologue.  Erechtheus  has  been  regarded  by  some  as  the 
best  attempt  at  that  (it  must  be  admitted  rather  artificial)  kind  of 
"  Greek  play  in  English,"  in  which  Atalanta  is  something  of  a 
tour  de  force,  and  Mr.  Arnold's  Merope  an  estimable  failure.  The 
extreme  beauty  of  parts  of  Both-well  was  somewhat  obscured  by 
its  inordinate  length ;  and  the  same  fault  was  found  by  some, 
with  less  justice,  in  Mary  Stuart  and  Tristram  of  Lyonesse,  the 
latter  a  poem  of  extraordinary  charm.  Of  the  later  books  it  is 
difficult  to  specify  parts.  The  Sisters,  not  generally  popular,  has 
great  distinctness  of  flavour,  and  exhibits  well  the  Northumbrian 
fidelities  which  have  so  advantageously  blended  with  Mr.  Swin- 
burne's Southern  studies  and  affections.  A  Tale  of  Balen,  in  the 
same  way,  mirrors,  with  an  engaging  idiosyncrasy  and  remarkable 
power  of  phrase,  the  poet's  own  impression  of  that  marvellous 
Legend  of  Arthur,  which  seems  to  have  the  power  at  once  of 
inspiring  most  true  poets,  and  of  inspiring  them  all  differently. 

Besides  his  verse,  Mr.  Swinburne  has  been  a  voluminous 
author  in  a  prose  which,  at  its  best,  is  inferior  to  no  prose  of  the 
ornate  kind  in  English.  This  division  of  his  work,  chiefly  critical 
in  character,  began  with  a  volume  on  William  Blake  (1867),  and 
continued  through  some  half-dozen  of  others,  mainly,  but  not 
wholly,  devoted  to  the  Elizabethan  drama.  Here,  as  in  the  verse, 
Mr.  Swinburne  has  been  accused  of  lacking  measure  both  in  the 
quality  of  his  praise  and  blame,  and  in  the  quantity  of  their 
expression  ;  and  here  also  the  charge  cannot  be  wholly  put  aside. 
But  that  beauty  of  particular  passages  which  has  been  noted  is 


300  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

here  also  matched  with  a  by  no  means  unfrequent  keenness  of 
appreciation  and  power  of  exposition,  which  seem  to  be  the 
peculiar  property  of  poets  dealing  with  poets,  and  in  the  display 
of  which  Mr.  Swinburne  at  his  happiest  admirably  completes  the 
quartette  with  Dryden  and  Coleridge  and  Shelley. 

In  all  these  three,  and  especially  in  Rossetti,  we  find  a  strong 
influence  of  pictorial  on  poetic  art ;  an  overpowering  tendency  to 
revert  to  the  forms  and  figures,  the  sense  and  sentiment  of  the 
past,  especially  the  mediaeval  past ;  and  a  further  tendency  to 
mysticism  poetic  in  character.  We  find  in  point  of  form  a 
distinct  preference  for  lyric  over  other  kinds,  a  fancy  for  archaic 
language  and  schemes  of  verse,  a  further  fancy  for  elaborate 
and  ornate  language  (which  does  not,  however,  exclude  perfect 
simplicity  when  the  poet  chooses),  and  above  all,  a  predilection 
for  attempting  and  a  faculty  for  achieving  effects  of  verbal 
music  by  cunning  adjustment  of  vowel  and  consonant  sound 
which,  though  it  had  been  anticipated  partially,  and  as  it  were 
accidentally  in  the  seventeenth  century,  and  had  been  after  the 
Romantic  revival  displayed  admirably  by  Coleridge  and  Keats, 
and  brought  to  a  high  pitch  by  Tennyson,  was  even  further 
elaborated  and  polished  by  the  present  school.  Indeed,  they 
may  be  said  to  have  absolutely  finished  this  poetical  appeal  as  a 
distinct  and  deliberate  one.  All  poets  have  always  attempted, 
and  all  poets  always  will  attempt,  and  when  they  are  great, 
achieve  these  enchanting  effects  of  mere  sound.  But  for  some 
considerable  time  it  will  not  be  possible  (indeed  it  will  be  quite 
impossible  until  the  structure,  the  intonation,  the  phrase  of 
English  have  taken  such  turns  as  will  develop  physical 
possibilities  as  different  from  those  of  our  language  as  ours  are 
from  those  of  the  seventeenth  century)  for  any  poets  to  get 
distinctly  great  effects  in  the  same  way.  It  is  proof  enough  of 
this  that,  except  the  masters,  no  poet  for  many  years  now  has 
achieved  a  great  effect  by  this  means,  and  that  the  most 
promising  of  the  newer  school,  whether  they  may  or  may  not 
have  found  a  substitute,  are  abandoning  it. 


vi  MISS  ROSSETTI  301 

Rossetti's  younger,  but  very  little  younger,  sister,  Christina 
Georgina,  was  born  in  1830,  sat  to  her  brother  early  for  the  charm- 
ing picture  of  "The  Girlhood  of  Mary  Virgin,"  and  is  said  also 
to  figure  in  his  illustration  of  the  weeping  queens  in  Tennyson's 
Morte  d' Arthur.  But  she  lived  an  exceedingly  quiet  life, 
mainly  occupied  in  attention  to  her  mother  and  in  devotion ; 
for  she  had  been  brought  up,  and  all  her  life  remained,  a  member 
of  the  Church  of  England.  Her  religious  feelings  more  and 
more  coloured  her  poetical  work,  which  was  produced  at  intervals 
from  1 86 1  till  close  upon  her  death  in  the  winter  of  1894-95.  It 
was  not  hastily  written,  and  of  late  formed  mainly  the  embellish- 
ment of  certain  prose  books  of  religious  reflection  or  excerpt. 
But  it  was  always  of  an  exquisite  quality.  Its  first  expression  in 
book  form  was  Goblin  Market  and  other  Poems  (1861),  which, 
as  well  as  her  next  volume,  The  Princes  Progress  (1866),  was 
illustrated  by  her  brother's  pencil.  A  rather  considerable  time 
then  passed  without  anything  of  importance  (a  book  called 
Sing- Song  excepted),  till  in  1881  A  Pageant  and  other  Poems  was 
added.  A  collection  of  all  these  was  issued  nine  years  later, 
but  with  this  the  gleanings  from  the  devotional  works  Time 
Flies  and  The  Face  of  the  Deep  have  still  to  be  united.  New 
Poems  (1896)  were  edited  posthumously  by  Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti. 

There  are  those  who  seriously  maintain  Miss  Rossetti's  claim 
to  the  highest  rank  among  English  poetesses,  urging  that  she 
excels  Mrs.  Browning,  her  only  possible  competitor,  in  freedom 
from  blemishes  of  form  and  from  the  liability  to  fall  into  silliness 
and  maudlin  gush,  at  least  as  much  as  she  falls  short  of  her  in 
variety  and  in  power  of  shaping  a  poem  of  considerable  bulk. 
But  without  attempting  a  too  rigid  classification,  we  may 
certainly  say  that  Miss  Rossetti  has  no  superior  among  English- 
women who  have  had  the  gift  of  poetry.  In  the  title-piece  of 
her  first  book  the  merely  quaint  side  of  Prse-Raphaelitism  perhaps 
appears  rather  too  strongly,  though  very  agreeably  to  some.  But 
"Dreamland,"  "Winter  Rain,"  "An  End,"  "Echo,"  the  exquisite 
song  for  music  "  When  I  am  dead,  my  dearest,"  and  the 


302  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

wonderful  devotional  pieces  called  "The  Three  Enemies"  and 
"  Sleep  at  Sea,"  with  many  charming  sonnets,  adorned  a  volume 
which,  on  the  whole,  showed  more  of  the  tendencies  of  the 
school  than  any  which  had  yet  appeared.  For  it  was  less 
exclusively  mediaeval  than  Mr.  Morris's  Defence  of  Guenevert, 
and  very  much  more  varied  as  well  as  more  mature  than 
Mr.  Swinburne's  Queen  Mother  and  Rosamond.  The  Prince's 
Progress  showed  a  great  advance  on  Goblin  Market  in  dignity 
and  freedom  from  mannerism,  and  the  minor  poems  in  general 
rivalled  those  in  the  earlier  collection,  though  the  poetess 
perhaps  never  quite  equalled  "  Sleep  at  Sea."  The  contents  of 
A  Pageant  and  other  Poems  were  at  once  more  serious  and  lighter 
than  those  of  the  two  former  books  (for  Miss  Rossetti,  like  her 
brother,  had  a  strong  touch  of  humour),  while  the  Collected  Poems 
added  some  excellent  pieces.  But  the  note  of  the  whole  had 
been  struck,  as  is  usually  the  case  with  good  poets  who  do  not 
publish  too  early,  at  the  very  first. 

Not  a  few  members,  intimate  or  outlying,  of  a  school  which 
hardly  became  a  largely  attended  one  till  the  last  third  of  the 
century  had  begun,  have  naturally  survived  its  close ;  but  "  the 
irreparable  outrage "  has  still  furnished  us  with  only  too  many 
to  add  to  the  leaders.  Mr.  John  Addington  Symonds,  an 
important  writer  of  prose,  began  early  and  never  abandoned 
the  practice  of  verse,  but  his  accomplishment  in  it  was  never 
more  than  an  accomplishment.  Mr.  Philip  Bourke  Marston,  son 
of  Dr.  Westland  Marston,  the  dramatist,  was  highly  reputed  as 
a  poet  by  his  friends,  but  friendship  and  compassion  (he  was 
blind)  had  perhaps  more  to  do  with  this  reputation  than  strict 
criticism.  The  remarkable  talents  of  Mr.  Gerard  Manley 
Hopkins,  which  could  never  be  mistaken  by  any  one  who  knew 
him,  and  of  which  some  memorials  remain  in  verse,  were  mainly 
lost  to  English  poetry  by  the  fact  of  his  passing  the  last  twenty 
years  of  his  life  as  a  Jesuit  priest.  But  the  most  characteristic  figure 
now  passed  away  was  Arthur  O'Shaughnessy  (1844-81).  He 
was  an  official  of  the  British  Museum,  and  published  three 


vi  O'SHAUGHNESSY  303 

volumes  of  poetry — The  Epic  of  Women  (1870),  Lays  of  France 
(1872),  and  Music  and  Moonlight  (1874) — which  were  completed 
in  the  year  of  his  death  by  a  posthumous  volume  entitled  Songs  of 
a  Worker.  Of  these  the  Lays  of  f ranee  are  merely  paraphrases 
of  Marie ;  great  part  of  the  Songs  of  a  Worker  is  occupied  with 
mere  translation  of  modern  French  verses — poor  work  for  a  poet 
at  all  times.  But  The  Epic  of  Women  and  Music  and  Moonlight 
contain  stuff  which  it  is  not  extravagant  to  call  extraordinary. 

It  was  never  widely  popular,  for  O'Shaughnessy  pushed  the 
fancy  of  the  Prse-Raphaelites  for  a  dreamy  remoteness  to  its  very 
furthest,  and  the  charge  (usually  an  uncritical  one,  but  usually 
also  explaining  with  a  certain  justice  a  poet's  unpopularity)  of 
"  lack  of  human  interest  "  was  brought  against  him.  Sometimes, 
too,  either  of  deliberate  conviction  or  through  corrupt  following 
of  others,  he  indulged  in  expressions  of  opinion  about  matters  on 
which  the  poet  is  not  called  upon  to  express  any,  in  a  manner 
which  was  always  unnecessary  and  sometimes  offensive.  But 
judged  as  a  poet  he  has  the  unum  necessarium,  the  individual 
note  of  song.  Like  Keats,  he  was  not  quite  individual — there 
are  echoes,  especially  of  Edgar  Poe,  in  him.  But  the  genuine 
and  authentic  contribution  is  sufficient,  and  is  of  the  most 
unmistakable  kind.  In  the  first  book  "  Exile,"  "  A  Neglected 
Heart,"  " Bisclavaret,"  "The  Fountain  of  Tears,"  "Barcarolle," 
make  a  new  mixture  of  the  fair  and  strange  in  meaning,  a  new 
valuation  of  the  eternal  possibilities  of  language  in  sound.  Music 
and  Moonlight — O'Shaughnessy  was  one  of  the  few  poets  who 
have  been  devoted  to  music — is  almost  more  remote,  and  even 
less  popularly  beautiful ;  but  the  opening  "  Ode,"  some  of  the 
lyrics  in  the  title  poem  (such  as  "  Once  in  a  hundred  years "), 
the  song  "Has  summer  come  without  the  rose,"  and  not  a  few 
others,  renew  for  those  who  can  receive  it  the  strange  attraction, 
the  attraction  most  happily  hinted  by  the  very  title  of  this  book 
itself,  which  O'Shaughnessy  could  exercise.  That  there  was  not  a 
little  that  is  morbid  in  him — as  perhaps  in  the  school  generally — 
sane  criticism  cannot  deny.  But  though  it  is  as  unwise  as  it  is 


304  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 


unsafe  to  prefer  morbidness  for  itself  or  to  give  it  too  great  way, 
there  are  undoubted  charms  in  it,  and  O'Shaughnessy  could  give 
poetical  form  to  these  as  few  others  could.  Two  of  his  own 

lines — 

Oh  !  exquisite  malady  of  the  soul, 
How  hast  thou  marred  me — 

put  the  thing  well.  Those  who  have  once  tasted  his  poetry 
return,  and  probably,  though  they  are  never  likely  to  be 
numerous,  always  when  they  have  once  tasted  will  return,  to 
the  visions  and  the  melodies — 

Of  a  dreamer  who  slumbers, 
And  a  singer  who  sings  no  more. 

Another  poet,  still  more  of  a  pessimist  than  O'Shaughnessy,  and 
who  may  be  said  to  belong,  with  some  striking  differences  of  cir- 
cumstance as  well  as  individual  genius,  to  the  same  school, 
was  James  Thomson,  second  of  the  name  in  English  poetry, 
but  a  curious  and  melancholy  contrast  to  that  "  Epicurean 
animal,"  the  poet  of  The  Seasons.  He  was  born  at  Port-Glasgow 
on  23rd  November  1834,  and  was  the  son  of  a  sailor.  His 
parents  being  in  poor  circumstances,  he  obtained,  as  a  child,  a 
place  in  the  Royal  Caledonian  Asylum,  and,  after  a  good  educa- 
tion there,  became  an  army  schoolmaster — a  post  which  he  held 
for  a  considerable  time.  But  Thomson's  natural  character  was 
recalcitrant  to  discipline  and  distinguished  by  a  morbid  social 
jealousy.  He  gradually,  under  the  influence  of,  or  at  any  rate  in 
company  with,  the  notorious  Charles  Bradlaugh,  adopted  atheistic 
and  republican  opinions,  and  in  1862  an  act  of  insubordination 
led  to  his  dismissal  from  the  army,  for  which  he  had  long  lost,  if 
he  ever  had,  any  liking.  It  is  also  said  that  the  death  of  a  girl  to 
whom  he  was  passionately  attached  had  much  to  do  with  the 
development  of  the  morbid  pessimism  by  which  he  became  dis- 
tinguished. For  some  time  Thomson  tried  various  occupations, 
being  by  turns  a  lawyer's  clerk,  a  mining  agent,  and  war  corre- 
spondent of  a  newspaper  with  the  Carlists.  But  even  before  he 


JAMES  THOMSON  305 


left  the  army  he  had,  partly  with  Mr.  Bradlaugh's  help,  obtained 
work  on  the  press,  and  such  income  as  he  had  during  the  last 
twenty  years  of  his  life  was  chiefly  derived  from  it.  He  might 
undoubtedly  have  made  a  comfortable  living  in  this  way,  for  his 
abilities  were  great  and  his  knowledge  not  small.  But  in  addition 
to  the  specially  poetical  weakness  of  disliking  "collar-work,"  he 
was  hampered  by  the  same  intractable  and  morose  temper  which 
he  had  shown  in  the  army,  by  the  violence  of  his  religious  and 
political  views,  and  lastly  and  most  fatally  by  an  increasing 
slavery  to  drink  and  chloral.  At  last,  in  1882,  he — after  having 
been  for  some  time  in  the  very  worst  health— burst  a  blood-vessel 
while  visiting  his  friend  the  blind  poet  Philip  Bourke  Marston, 
and  died  in  University  College  Hospital  en  3rd  June. 

This  melancholy  story  is  to  be  found  sufficiently  reflected  in 
his  works.  Those  in  prose,  though  not  contemptible,  neither 
deserve  nor  are  likely  to  receive  long  remembrance,  being  for  the 
most  part  critical  studies,  animated  by  a  real  love  for  literature 
and  informed  by  respectable  knowledge,  but  of  necessity  lack- 
ing in  strict  scholarship,  distinguished  by  more  acuteness  than 
wisdom,  and  marred  by  the  sectarian  violence  and  narrowness  of 
a  small  anti-orthodox  clique.  They  may,  perhaps,  be  not  unfairly 
compared  to  the  work  of  a  clever  but  ill-conditioned  schoolboy. 
The  verse  is  very  different.  He  began  to  write  it  early,  and  it 
chiefly  appeared  in  Mr.  Bradlaugh's  National  Reformer  with  the 
signature  "  B.  V.,"  the  initials  of  "  Bysshe  Vanolis,"  a  rather 
characteristic  nom  de  guerre  which  Thomson  had  taken  to  express 
his  admiration  for  Shelley  directly,  and  for  Novalis  by  anagram. 
Some  of  it,  however,  emerged  into  a  wider  hearing,  and  attracted 
the  favourable  attention  of  men  like  Kingsley  and  Froude.  But 
Thomson  did  nothing  of  importance  till  1874,  when  "The  City  of 
Dreadful  Night "  appeared  in  the  National  Reformer,  to  the  no 
small  bewilderment  probably  of  its  readers.  Six  years  later  the 
poem  was  printed  with  others  in  a  volume,  quickly  followed  by  a 
second,  Vane's  Story,  etc.  Thomson's  melancholy  death  attracted 
fresh  attention  to  him,  and  much — perhaps  a  good  deal  too  much 

x 


306  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

— of  his  writings  has  been  republished  since.  His  claims,  however, 
must  rest  on  a  comparatively  small  body  of  work,  which  will  no 
doubt  one  day  be  selected  and  issued  alone.  "The  City  of 
Dreadful  Night "  itself,  incomparably  the  best  of  the  longer  poems, 
is  a  pessimist  and  nihilist  effusion  of  the  deepest  gloom  amount- 
ing to  despair,  but  couched  in  stately  verse  of  an  absolute 
sincerity  and  containing  some  splendid  passages.  With  this  is 
connected  one  of  the  latest  pieces,  the  terrible  "  Insomnia."  Of 
lighter  strain,  written  when  the  poet  could  still  be  happy,  are 
"Sunday  at  Hampstead "  and  "Sunday  up  the  River,"  "The 
Naked  Goddess,"  and  one  or  two  others  ;  while  other  things,  such 
as  "The  fire  that  filled  my  heart  of  old,"  must  also  be  cited. 
Even  against  these  the  charge  of  a  monotonous,  narrow,  and 
irrational  misery  has  been  brought.  But  what  saves  Thomson  is 
the  perfection  with  which  he  expresses  the  negative  and  hopeless 
side  of  the  sense  of  mystery,  of  the  Unseen ;  just  as  Miss 
Rossetti  expresses  the  positive  and  hopeful  one.  No  two  con- 
temporary poets,  perhaps,  ever  completed  each  other  in  a  more 
curious  way  than  this  Bohemian  atheist  and  this  devout  lady. 

So  far  in  this  chapter  the  story  of  poetry,  from  Tennyson 
downwards,  has  been  conducted  in  regular  fashion,  and  by  citing 
the  principal  names  which  represent  the  chief  schools  or  sub- 
schools.  But  we  must  now  return  to  notice  a  very  considerable 
company  of  other  verse-writers,  without  mention  of  whom  this 
history  would  be  wofully  incomplete.  Nor  must  it  by  any  means 
be  supposed  that  they  are  to  be  regarded  invariably  as  constituting 
a  "  second  class."  On  the  contrary,  some  of  them  are  the  equals, 
one  or  two  the  superiors,  of  Thomson  or  of  O'Shaughnessy.  But 
they  have  been  postponed,  either  because  they  belong  to  schools 
of  which  the  poets  already  mentioned  are  masters,  to  choruses  of 
which  others  are  the  leaders,  or  because  they  show  rather  blended 
influences  than  a  distinct  and  direct  advance  in  the  main  poetical 
line  of  development.  Others  again  rank  here,  and  not  earlier, 
because  they  are  of  the  second  class,  or  a  lower  one. 

Of  these,  though  he  leaves  a  name  certain  to  live  in  English 


vi  M.  F.  TUPPER  307 

literary  history,  if  not  perhaps  quite  in  the  way  in  which  its  author 
wished,  is  Martin  Farquhar  Tupper,  who  was  born,  in  1810,  of  a 
very  respectable  family  in  the  Channel  Islands,  his  father  being  a 
surgeon  of  eminence.  Tupper  was  educated  at  the  Charterhouse 
and  at  Christ  Church,  and  was  called  to  the  bar.  But  he  gave 
himself  up  to  literature,  especially  poetry  or  verse,  of  which  he 
wrote  an  enormous  quantity.  His  most  famous  book  appeared 
originally  in  1839,  though  it  was  afterwards  continued.  It  was 
called  Proverbial  Philosophy,  and  criticised  life  in  rhythmical  rather 
than  metrical  lines,  with  a  great  deal  of  orthodoxy.  Almost  from 
the  first  the  critics  and  the  wits  waged  unceasing  war  against  it ; 
but  the  public,  at  least  for  many  years,  bought  it  with  avidity,  and 
perhaps  read  it,  so  that  it  went  through  forty  editions,  and  is  said 
to  have  brought  in  twenty  thousand  pounds.  Nor  is  it  at  all 
certain  that  any  genuine  conception  of  its  pretentious  triviality 
had  much  to  do  with  the  decay  which,  after  many  years,  it,  like 
other  human  things,  experienced.  Mr.  Tupper,  who  did  not  die 
till  1889,  is  understood  to  have  been  privately  an  amiable  and 
rather  accomplished  person,  and  some  of  his  innumerable  minor 
copies  of  verse  attain  a  very  fair  standard  of  minor  poetry.  But 
Proverbial  Philosophy  remains  as  one  of  the  bright  and  shining 
examples  of  the  absolute  want  of  connection  between  literary 
merit  and  popular  success. 

Frederick  Tennyson,  eldest  of  the  three  contributors  to  Poems 
by  Two  Brothers,  and  born  in  1807,  lived  till  1898.  His  poetical 
power,  not  small,  was  chiefly  shown  in  Days  and  Hours  (1854); 
after  long  silence,  he  published  other  volumes  in  his  last 
decade.  Charles,  who  afterwards  took  the  name  of  Turner, 
and,  having  been  born  in  1808,  died  in  1879,  was  particularly 
famous  as  a  sonneteer,  producing  in  this  form  many  good  and 
some  excellent  examples.  Arthur  Hallam,  whom  In  Memoriam 
has  made  immortal,  was  credited  by  the  partial  judgment  of  his 
friends  with  talents  which,  they  would  fain  think,  were  actually 
shown  both  in  verse  and  prose.  A  wiser  criticism  will  content 
itself  with  saying  that  in  one  sense  he  produced  In  Memoriam 


308  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

itself,  and  that  this  is  enough  connection  with  literature  for  any  man. 
His  own  work  has  a  suspicious  absence  of  faults,  without  the 
presence  of  any  great  positive  merit, — a  combination  almost 
certainly  indicating  precocity,  to  be  followed  by  sterility.  But 
this  consummation  he  was  spared.  John  Sterling,  who  has  been 
already  referred  to,  and  who  stands  to  Carlyle  in  what  may  be  called 
a  prose  version  of  the  relation  between  Tennyson  and  Hallam, 
wrote  some  verse  which  is  at  least  interesting ;  and  Sir  Francis 
Doyle,  also  elsewhere  mentioned,  belongs  to  the  brood  of  the 
remarkable  years  1807-14,  having  been  born  in  1810.  But  his 
splendid  war-songs  were  written  not  very  early  in  life. 

Of  the  years  just  mentioned,  the  first,  1807,  contributed, 
besides  Mr.  Frederick  Tennyson,  the  very  considerable  talent 
of  Archbishop  Trench,  a  Harrow  and  Trinity  (Cambridge)  man 
who  had  an  actual  part  in  the  expedition  to  Spain  from  which 
Sterling  retreated,  took  orders,  and  ended  a  series  of  ecclesiastical 
promotions  by  the  Archbishopric  of  Dublin,  to  which  he  was 
consecrated  in  1864,  which  he  held  with  great  dignity  and  address 
during  the  extremely  trying  period  of  Disestablishment,  and  which 
he  resigned  in  1884,  dying  two  years  later.  Trench  wrote  always 
well,  and  always  as  a  scholar,  on  a  wide  range  of  subjects.  He 
was  an  interesting  philologist, — his  Study  of  Words  being  the  most 
popular  of  scholarly  and  the  most  scholarly  of  popular  works  on 
the  subject, — a  valuable  introducer  of  the  exquisite  sacred  Latin 
poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages  to  Englishmen,  a  sound  divine  in 
preaching  and  teaching.  His  original  English  verse  was  chiefly 
written  before  the  middle  of  the  century,  though  perhaps  his  best 
known  (not  his  best)  verses  are  on  the  Battle  of  the  Alma.  He 
was  a  good  sonneteer  and  an  excellent  hymn-writer. 

1809  contributed  three  writers  of  curiously  contrasted  character. 
One  was  Professor  Blackie,  an  eccentric  and  amiable  man,  a 
translator  of  ^Eschylus,  and  a  writer  of  songs  of  a  healthy  and 
spirited  kind.  The  second,  Dr.  Thomas  Gordon  Hake,  a  poet 
of  Parables,  has  never  been  popular,  and  perhaps  seldom  arrived 
at  that  point  of  projection  in  which  poetical  alchemy  finally  and 


vi  HAKE— LORD  HOUGHTON  309 

successfully  transmutes  the  rebel  materials  of  thought  and  phrase 
into  manifest  gold ;  but  he  had  very  high  and  distinctly  rare 
poetical  qualities.  Such  things  as  "Old  Souls,"  "The  Snake 
Charmer,"  "The  Palmist,"  three  capital  examples  of  his  work, 
are  often,  and  not  quite  wrongly,  objected  to  in  different  forms  of 
some  such  a  phrase  as  this  :  "  Poetry  that  is  perfect  poetry  ought 
never  to  subject  any  tolerable  intellect  to  the  necessity  of  search- 
ing for  its  meaning.  It  is  not  necessary  that  it  should  yield  up 
the  whole  treasures  of  that  meaning  at  once,  but  it  must  carry  on 
the  face  of  it  such  a  competent  quantity  as  will  relieve  the  reader 
from  postponing  the  poetic  enjoyment  in  order  to  solve  the 
intellectual  riddle."  The  truth  of  this  in  the  main,  and  the 
demurrers  and  exceptions  to  it  in  part,  are  pretty  clear ;  nor  is 
this  the  place  to  state  them  at  length.  It  is  sufficient  to  say  that 
in  Dr.  Hake's  verse,  especially  that  part  of  it  published  between 
1870  and  1880  under  the  titles  Madeline,  Parables  and  Tales, 
New  Symbols,  Legends  of  the  Morrow,  and  Maiden  Ecstasy,  the 
reader  of  some  poetical  experience  will  seldom  fail  to  find  satis- 
faction. 

It  is  impossible  to  imagine  a  greater  contrast  than  that  of  this 
poet  with  Lord  Houghton,  earlier  known  to  everybody  as  Richard 
Monckton  Milnes,  who  died  in  1885.  He  was  of  the  golden 
age  of  Trinity  during  this  century,  the  age  of  Tennyson,  and 
throughout  life  he  had  an  amiable  fancy  for  making  the  acquaint- 
ance of  everybody  who  made  any  name  in  literature,  and  of  many 
who  made  none.  A  practical  and  active  politician,  and  a  constant 
figure  in  society,  he  was  also  a  very  considerable  man  of  letters. 
His  critical  work  (principally  but  not  wholly  collected  in  Monographs] 
is  not  great  in  bulk,  but  is  exceedingly  good  both  in  substance 
and  in  style.  His  verse,  on  the  other  hand,  which  was  chiefly  the 
produce  of  the  years  before  he  came  to  middle  life,  is  a  little  slight, 
and  perhaps  appears  slighter  than  it  really  is.  Few  poets  have 
ever  been  more  successful  with  songs  for  music  :  the  "Brookside  " 
(commonly  called  from  its  refrain,  "  The  beating  of  my  own 
heart''),  the  famous  and  really  fine  "Strangers  Yet,"  are  the  best 


310  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

known,  but  there  are  many  others.  Lord  Houghton  undoubtedly 
had  no  strong  vein  of  poetry.  But  it  was  an  entire  mistake  to 
represent  him  as  either  a  mere  fribble  or  a  mere  sentimentalist, 
while  with  more  inducements  to  write  he  would  probably  have 
been  one  of  the  very  best  critics  of  his  age. 

It  is  necessary  once  more  to  approach  the  unsatisfactory  brevity 
of  a  catalogue  in  order  to  mention,  since  it  would  be  wrong  to  omit, 
Sir  Samuel  Ferguson  (1810-86),  an  Irish  writer  who  produced 
some  pleasant  and  spirited  work  of  ordinary  kinds,  and  laboured 
very  hard  to  achieve  that  often  tried  but  seldom  achieved  adventure, 
the  rendering  into  English  poetry  of  Irish  Celtic  legends  and 
literature;  Alfred  Domett  (1811-87),  author  of  the  New  Zealand 
epic  of  Ranulf  and  Amohia  and  much  other  verse,  but  most 
safely  grappled  to  English  poetry  as  Browning's  "Waring"; 
W.  B.  Scott  (1812-90),  an  outlying  member  of  the  Prae- 
Raphaelite  School  in  art  and  letters,  in  whom  for  the  most  part 
execution  lagged  behind  conception  both  with  pen  and  pencil  ; 
Charles  Mackay  (1814-89),  an  active  journalist  who  wrote  abund 
antly  in  verse  and  prose,  his  best  things  perhaps  being  the  mid- 
century  "  Cholera  Chant,"  the  once  well-known  song  of  "  A  good 
time  coming,"  and  in  a  sentimental  strain  the  piece  called 
"  O,  ye  Tears " ;  and  Mrs.  Archer  Clive,  the  author  of  the  re- 
markable novel  of  Paul  Ferroll,  whose  IX.  Poems  by  V.  attracted 
much  attention  from  competent  critics  in  the  doubtful  time  of 
poetry  about  the  middle  of  the  century,  and  are  really 
good. 

Not  many  writers,  either  in  prose  or  poetry,  give  the  impression 
of  never  having  done  what  was  in  them  more  than  William  Edmons- 
toune  Aytoun,  who  was  born  in  1813  and  died  in  1865.  He  was  a 
son-in-law  of  "  Christopher  North,"  and  like  him  a  pillar  of  Black- 
woods  M'agazine^  in  which  some  of  his  best  things  in  prose  and  verse 
appeared.  He  divided  himself  between  law  and  literature,  and  in 
his  rather  short  life  rose  to  a  Professorship  in  the  latter  and  a 
Sheriffdom  in  the  former,  deserving  the  credit  of  admirably  stimu- 
lating influence  in  the  first  capacity  and  competent  performance 


VI  AYTOUN  311 

in  the  second.  He  published  poems  when  he  was  only  seventeen. 
But  his  best  work  consists  of  the  famous  Bon  Gaidtier  Ballads — a 
collection  of  parodies  and  light  poems  of  all  kinds  written  in 
conjunction  with  Sir  Theodore  Martin,  and  one  of  the  pleasantest 
books  of  the  kind  that  the  century  has  seen — and  the  more  serious 
Lays  of  the  Scottish  Cavaliers,  both  dating  from  the  forties,  the 
satirically  curious  Firmilian  (see  below),  1854,  and  some  Blackwood 
stories,  of  which  the  very  best  perhaps  is  The  Glenmutchkin 
Railway.  His  long  poem  of  Bothwell,  1855,  and  his  novel  of 
Norman  Sinclair,  1861,  are  less  successful. 

The  Lays  of  the  Scottish  Cavaliers,  on  which  his  chief  serious 
claim  must  rest,  is  an  interesting  book,  if  hardly  a  great  one. 
The  style  is  modelled  with  extreme  closeness  upon  that  of  Scott, 
which  even  Sir  Walter,  with  all  his  originality  and  genius,  had  not 
been  able  always  to  preserve  from  flatness.  In  Aytoun's  hands 
the  flats  are  too  frequent,  though  they  are  relieved  and  broken  at 
times  by  really  splendid  bursts,  the  best  of  which  perhaps  are 
"  The  Island  of  the  Scots  "  and  "  The  Heart  of  the  Bruce."  For 
Aytoun's  poetic  vein,  except  in  the  lighter  kinds,  was  of  no  very 
great  strength  ;  and  an  ardent  patriotism,  a  genuine  and  gallant 
devotion  to  the  Tory  cause,  and  a  keen  appreciation  of  the 
chivalrous  and  romantic,  did  not  always  suffice  to  supply  the  want 
of  actual  inspiration. 

If  it  had  been  true,  as  is  commonly  said,  that  the  before- 
mentioned  Firmilian  killed  the  so-called  Spasmodic  school, 
Aytoun's  failure  to  attain  the  upper  regions  of  poetry  would  have 
been  a  just  judgment ;  for  the  persons  whom  he  satirised,  though 
less  clever  and  humorous,  were  undoubtedly  more  poetical  than 
himself.  But  nothing  is  ever  killed  in  this  way,  and  as  a  matter 
of  fact  the  spasmodic  School  of  the  early  fifties  was  little  more 
than  one  of  the  periodical  outbursts  of  poetic  velleity,  more 
genuine  than  vigorous  and  more  audacious  than  organic,  which 
are  constantly  witnessed.  It  is,  as  usual,  not  very  easy  to  find  out 
who  were  the  supposed  scholars  in  this  school.  Mr.  P.  J.  Bailey, 
the  author  of  Festits,  the  last  survivor,  is  sometimes  classed  with 


312  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 


them  ;  but  the  chief  members  are  admitted  to  have  been  Sydney 
Dobell  and  Alexander  Smith,  both  remarkable  persons,  both  failures 
of  something  which  might  in  each  case  have  been  a  considerable 
poet,  and  both  illustrating  the  "second  middle"  period  of  the  poetry 
of  the  century  which  corresponds  to  that  illustrated  earlier  by 
Darley,  Home,  and  Beddoes. 

Of  this  pair,  Sydney  Dobell  had  some,  and  Alexander  Smith 
had  others,  of  the  excuses  which  charity  not  divorced  from 
critical  judgment  makes  for  imperfect  poets.  Dobell,  with  sufficient 
leisure  for  poetical  production,  had  a  rather  unfortunate  education 
and  exceedingly  bad  health.  Smith  had  something  of  both  of 
these,  and  the  necessity  of  writing  for  bread  as  well.  Dobell,  the 
elder  of  the  two,  and  the  longer  lived,  though  both  died  com- 
paratively young,  was  a  Kentish  man,  born  at  Cranbrook  on  5th 
April  1824.  When  he  was  of  age  his  father  established  himself 
as  a  wine -merchant  at  Cheltenham,  and  Sydney  afterwards 
exercised  the  same  not  unpoetical  trade.  He  went  to  no  school 
and  to  no  university,  privations  especially  dangerous  to  a  person 
inclined  as  he  was  to  a  kind  of  passionate  priggishness.  He  was 
always  ill ;  and  his  wife,  to  whom  he  engaged  himself  while  a  boy, 
and  whom  he  married  before  he  had  ceased  to  be  one,  was  always  ill 
likewise.  He  travelled  a  good  deal,  with  results  more  beneficial 
to  his  poetry  than  to  his  health  ;  and,  the  latter  becoming  ever 
worse,  he  died  near  Cheltenham  on  22nd  August  1874.  His  first 
work,  an  "  Italomaniac  "  closet  drama  entitled  The  Roman,  was 
published  in  1850  ;  his  second,  Balder,  in  1853.  This  latter  has 
been  compared  to  Ibsen's  Brand :  I  do  not  know  whether  any 
one  has  noticed  other  odd,  though  slight,  resemblances  between 
Peer  Gynt  and  Beddoes's  chief  work.  The  Crimean  War  had  a 
strong  influence  on  Dobell,  and  besides  joining  Smith  in  Sonnets 
on  the.  War  (1855),  he  wrote  by  himself  England  in  Time  of  ll'ar, 
next  year.  He  did  not  publish  anything  else,  but  his  works 
were  edited  shortly  after  his  death  by  Professor  Nichol. 

Alexander  Smith,  like  so  many  of  the  modern  poets  of  Scot- 
land, was  born  in  quite  humble  life,  and  had  not  even  the  full 


VI  ALEXANDER  SMITH  313 

advantages  open  to  a  Scottish  "lad  o'  pairts."  His  birth-place, 
however,  was  Kilmarnock,  a  place  not  alien  to  the  Muses ;  and 
before  he  was  twenty-one  (his  birth  year  is  diversely  given  as  1829 
and  1830)  the  Rev.  George  Gilfillan,  an  amiable  and  fluent  critic  of 
the  middle  of  the  century,  who  loved  literature  very  much  and 
praised  its  practitioners  with  more  zeal  than  discrimination,  pro- 
cured the  publication  of  the  Life  Drama.  It  sold  enormously;  it  is 
necessary  to  have  been  acquainted  with  those  who  were  young  at  the 
time  of  its  appearance  to  believe  in  the  enthusiasm  with  which  it 
was  received ;  but  a  little  intelligence  and  a  very  little  good-will 
will  enable  the  critic  to  understand,  if  not  to  share  their  raptures. 
For  a  time  Smith  was  deliberately  pitted  against  Tennyson  by 
"  the  younger  sort,"  as  Dennis  says  of  the  faction  for  Settle 
against  Dryden  in  his  days  at  Cambridge.  The  reaction  which, 
mercifully  for  the  chances  of  literature  if  not  quite  pleasantly  for 
the  poet,  always  comes  in  such  cases,  was  pretty  rapid,  and  Smith, 
ridiculed  in  Firmilian,  was  more  seriously  taxed  with  crudity  (which 
was  just),  plagiarism  (which  was  absurd),  and  want  of  measure 
(which,  like  the  crudity,  can  hardly  be  denied).  Smith,  however, 
was  not  by  any  means  a  weakling  except  physically  ;  he  could 
even  satirise  himself  sensibly  and  good-humouredly  enough ;  and 
his  popularity  had  the  solid  result  of  giving  him  a  post  in  the 
University  of  Edinburgh  —  not  lucrative  and  by  no  means  a 
sinecure,  but  not  too  uncongenial,  and  allowing  him  a  chance  both 
to  read  and  to  write.  For  some  time  he  stuck  to  poetry,  publishing 
City  Poems  in  1857  and  Edwin  of  Deira  in  1861.  But  the  taste 
for  his  wares  had  dwindled  :  perhaps  his  own  poetic  impulse,  a 
true  but  not  very  strong  one,  was  waning  ;  and  he  turned  to  prose, 
in  which  he  produced  a  story  or  two  and  some  pleasant  descriptive 
work — Dreamthorpe  (1863),  and  A  Summer  in  Skye  (1865).  Con- 
sumption showed  itself,  and  he  died  on  8th  January  1867. 

It  has  already  been  said  that  there  is  much  less  of  a  distinct 
brotherhood  in  Dobell  and  Smith,  or  of  any  membership  of  a  larger 
but  special  "  Spasmodic  school,"  than  of  the  well-known  and 
superficially  varying  but  generally  kindred  spirit  of  periods  and 


314  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


persons  in  which  and  in  whom  poetic  yearning  does  not  find  organs 
or  opportunities  thoroughly  suited  to  satisfy  itself.  Uobell  is 
the  more  unequal,  but  the  better  of  the  two  in  snatches.  His 
two  most  frequently  quoted  things — "Tommy's  Dead"  and  the 
untitled  ballad  where  the  refrain — 

Oh,  Keith  of  Ravelston, 

The  sorrows  of  thy  line  ! 

occurs  at  irregular  intervals — are  for  once  fair  samples  of  their 
author's  genius.  "  Tommy's  Dead,"  the  lament  of  a  father  over 
his  son,  is  too  long,  it  has  frequent  flatnesses,  repetitions  that  do 
not  add  to  the  effect,  bits  of  mere  gush,  trivialities.  The  tragic 
and  echoing  magnificence  of  the  Ravelston  refrain  is  not  quite 
seconded  by  the  text ;  both  to  a  certain  extent  deserve  the  epithet 
(which  I  have  repudiated  for  Beddoes  in  another  place)  of 
"  artificial."  And  yet  both  have  the  fragmentary,  not  to  be  analysed, 
almost  uncanny  charm  and  grandeur  which  have  been  spoken 
of  in  that  place.  Nor  do  this  charm,  this  grandeur,  fail  to 
reappear  (always  more  or  less  closely  accompanied  by  the  faults 
just  mentioned,  and  also  by  a  kind  of  flatulent  rant  which  is 
worse  than  any  of  them)  both  in  Dobell's  war-songs,  which  may 
be  said  in  a  way  to  hand  the  torch  on  from  Campbell  to  Mr. 
Kipling,  and  in  his  marvellously  unequal  blank  verse,  where  the 
most  excellent  thought  and  phrase  alternate  with  sheer  balderdash 
— a  pun  which  (it  need  hardly  be  said)  was  not  spared  by  con- 
temporary critics  to  the  author  of  Balder. 

Alexander  Smith  never  rises  to  the  heights  nor  strikes  the 
distinct  notes  of  Dobell ;  but  the  Life  Drama  is  really  on  the 
whole  better  than  either  Balder  or  The  Roman,  and  is  full  ot 
what  may  be  called,  from  opposite  points  of  view,  happy  thoughts 
and  quaint  conceits,  expressed  in  a  stamp  of  verse  certainly  not  quite 
original,  but  melodious  always,  and  sometimes  very  striking.  He 
has  not  yet  had  his  critical  resurrection,  and  perhaps  none  such 
will  ever  exalt  him  to  a  very  high  prominent  position.  He  seems 
to  suffer  from  the  operation  of  that  mysterious  but  very  real  law 


MINOR  POETS 


which  decrees  that  undeserved  popularity  shall  be  followed  by 
neglect  sometimes  even  more  undeserved.  But  when  he  does 
finally  find  his  level,  it  will  not  be  a  very  low  one. 

To  the  Spasmodics  may  be  appended  yet  another  list  of  bards 
who  can  claim  here  but  the  notice  of  a  sentence  or  a  clause, 
though  by  no  means  uninteresting  to  the  student,  and  often  very 
interesting  indeed  to  the  student-lover  of  poetry  : — the  two  Joneses 
—Ernest  (1819-69),  a  rather  silly  victim  of  Chartism,  for  which  he 
went  to  prison,  but  a  generous  person  and  master  of  a  pretty 
twitter  enough;  and  Ebenezer  (1820-60),  a  London  clerk,  author 
of  Studies  of  Sensation  and  Event,  a  rather  curious  link  between 
the  Cockney  school  of  the  beginning  of  the  century  and  some 
minor  poets  of  our  own  times,  but  overpraised  by  his  rediscoverers 
some  years  ago ;  W.  C.  Bennett,  a  popular  song-writer ;  William 
Cory  (  ?  -1892),  earlier  and  better  known  as  Johnson,  an  Eton 
master,  a  scholar,  an  admirable  writer  of  prose,  and  in  lonica  of 
verse,  slightly  effeminate,  but  with  a  note  in  it  not  unworthy  of 
one  glance  of  its  punning  title;  W.  C.  Roscoe  (1823-59),  grand- 
son of  the  historian,  a  minor  poet  in  the  best  sense  of  the  term ; 
William  Allingham  (1824-89),  sometime  editor  of  Fraser,  and  a 
writer  of  verse  from  whom  at  one  time  something  might  have  been 
expected;  Thomas  Woolner,  a  sculptor  of  great,  and — in  My 
Beautiful  Lady,  Pygmalion,  etc. — a  poet  of  estimable  merit,  whose 
first-named  volume  attracted  rather  disproportionate  praise  at  its 
first  appearance.  As  one  thinks  of  the  work  of  these  and  others — 
often  enjoyable,  sometimes  admirable,  and  long  ago  or  later  admired 
and  enjoyed— the  unceremoniousness  of  despatching  them  so 
slightly  brings  a  twinge  of  shame.  But  it  is  impossible  to  do 
justice  to  their  work,  or  to  the  lyrics,  merry  or  sensuous,  of 
Mortimer  Collins,  who  was  nearly  a  real  poet  of  vers  de  societ'e,  and 
had  a  capital  satiric  and  a  winning  romantic  touch  ;  the  stirring 
ballads  of  Walter  Thornbury  (which,  however,  would  hardly  have 
been  written  but  for  Macaulay  on  the  one  hand  and  Barham  on 
the  other),  and  the  ill-conditioned  but  clever  Radical  railing  of 
Robert  Brough  at  "  Gentlemen."  But  if  they  cannot  be  discussed, 


3'6  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP 

they  shall  at  least  be  mentioned.  On  three  others,  Frederick 
Locker,  Arthur  Hugh  Clough,  and  "Owen  Meredith"  (Lord 
Lytton),  we  must  dwell  longer. 

Clough  has  been  called  by  persons  of  distinction  a  "  bad 
poet "  ;  but  this  was  only  a  joke,  and,  with  all  respect  to  those  who 
made  it,  a  rather  bad  joke.  The  author  of  "  Qua  Cursum  Ventus," 
of  the  marvellous  picture  of  the  advancing  tide  in  "  Say  not  the 
struggle,"  and  of  not  a  few  other  things,  was  certainly  no  bad 
poet,  though  it  would  not  be  uncritical  to  call  him  a  thin  one. 
He  was  born  at  Liverpool  on  New  Year's  Day  1819,  spent  part  of 
his  childhood  in  America,  went  to  Rugby  very  young,  and  dis- 
tinguished himself  there  greatly,  though  it  may  be  doubted  whether 
the  peculiar  system  which  Arnold  had  just  brought  into  full  play 
was  the  healthiest  for  a  self-conscious  and  rather  morbid  nature 
like  Clough's.  From  Rugby  he  went  to  Balliol,  and  was  entirely 
upset,  not,  as  is  sometimes  most  unjustly  said,  by  Newman,  but  by 
the  influence  of  W.  G.  Ward,  a  genial  Puck  of  theology,  who, 
himself  caring  for  nothing  but  mathematics,  philosophy,  and  play- 
acting, disturbed  the  consciences  of  others  by  metaphysical 
quibbles,  and  then  took  refuge  in  the  Church  of  Rome.  Clough, 
who  had  been  elected  to  an  Oriel  Fellowship,  threw  it  up  in  1848, 
turned  freethinker,  and  became  the  head  of  an  educational  in- 
stitution in  London  called  University  Hall.  He  did  not  hold  this 
very  long,  receiving  a  post  in  the  Education  Office,  which  he  held 
in  various  forms  till  his  death  in  1861  at  Florence. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  be  biassed  by  Matthew  Arnold's 
musical  epicede  of  "Thyrsis"  in  order  to  admit,  nor  should 
any  bias  against  his  theological  views  and  his  rather  rest- 
less character  be  sufficient  to  induce  any  one  to  deny,  a  distinct 
vein  of  poetry  in  Clough.  His  earliest  and  most  popular  con- 
siderable work,  'Hie  Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich  (the  title  of  which 
was  originally  rather  different),  is  written  in  hexameters  which  do 
not,  like  Kingsley's,  escape  the  curse  of  that  "  pestilent  heresy  "  ; 
and  the  later  Amours  de  Voyage  and  Dipsychus,  though  there  are 
fine  passages  in  both,  bring  him  very  close  to  the  Spasmodic  school, 


VI  CLOUGH— LOCKER  317 

of  which  in  fact  he  was  an  unattached  and  more  cultivated  member, 
with  fancies  directed  rather  to  religiosity  than  to  strict  literature. 
Ambarvalia  had  preceded  the  Bothie,  and  other  things  followed. 
On  the  whole,  Clough  is  one  of  the  most  unsatisfactory  products  of 
that  well-known  form  of  nineteenth  century  scepticism  which  has 
neither  the  strength  to  believe  nor  the  courage  to  disbelieve  "  and 
have  done  with  it."  He  hankers  and  looks  back,  his  "two 
souls  "  are  always  warring  with  each  other,  and  though  the  clash 
and  conflict  sometimes  bring  out  fine  things  (as  in  the  two  pieces 
above  cited  and  the  still  finer  poem  at  Naples  with  the  refrain 
"  Christ  is  not  risen  "),  though  his  "Latest  Decalogue  "  has  satirical 
merit,  and  some  of  his  country  poems,  written  without  under- 
current of  thought,  are  fresh  and  genial,  he  is  on  the  whole  a 
failure.  But  he  is  a  failure  of  a  considerable  poet,  and  some 
fragments  of  success  chequer  him. 

Frederick  Locker,  who  on  his  second  marriage  took  the 
additional  name  of  Lampson,  was  born  in  1821  of  a  family  long 
connected  with  the  Navy  and  with  Greenwich  Hospital.  He 
himself  held  for  some  years  a  post  in  the  Admiralty ;  but  he  was 
much  more  addicted  to  society  and  to  literature  than  to  official 
work.  His  first  marriage  with  Lady  Charlotte  Bruce  strengthened 
his  social  position,  and  his  second  gave  him  wealth.  He  published, 
as  early  as  1857,  a  volume  of  light  verse  entitled  London  Lyrics, 
which,  with  the  work  of  Prior,  Praed,  and  Mr.  Austin  Dobson, 
stands  at  the  head  of  its  kind  in  English.  But — an  exceedingly 
rare  thing  for  amateur  as  well  as  for  professional  writers  in  our 
time — he  was  not  tempted  either  by  profit  or  fame  to  write 
copiously.  He  added  during  his  not  short  life,  which  closed  in 
May  1895,  a  few  more  poems  to  London  Lyrics.  He  edited  in 
1867  an  anthology  of  his  own  kind  of  verse  called  Lyra  Elegan- 
tiarum,  and  in  1879  ne  produced  a  miscellany  of  verse  and  prose, 
original  and  selected,  called  Patchwork,  in  which  some  have  seen 
his  most  accomplished  and  characteristic  production.  In  form  it 
is  something  like  Southey's  Omniana,  partly  a  commonplace  book, 
partly  full  of  original  things;  but  the  extracts  are  so  choicely 


318  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

made  and  the  original  part  is  so  delightful  that  it  is  not  quite  like 
any  book  in  the  language.  If  Charles  Lamb  had  been  of  Mr. 
Locker's  time  and  circumstances  he  might  have  made  its  fellow. 
"  My  Guardian  Angel,"  a  short  prose  anecdote,  is,  as  nearly  as  the 
present  writer  knows,  unique.  Latterly  its  author  was  chiefly 
known  as  a  man  of  much  hospitality  and  a  collector  of  choice 
books.  He  would  not  do  anything  bad,  and  apparently  he  did 
not  feel  inclined  to  do  anything  good.  And  as  this  is  a  century 
when  almost  everybody  must  still  be  doing,  and  taking  the  chance 
of  goodness  and  badness,  such  an  exception  to  the  rule  should 
meet  with  honour. 

No  poet  of  the  period,  perhaps  none  of  the  century,  occupies  a 
position  less  settled  by  general  criticism,  or  more  difficult  to  settle, 
than  that  of  Edward  Robert,  first  Earl  of  Lytton,  for  a  long  time 
known  in  poetry  as  "Owen  Meredith."  The  only  son  of  the 
novelist,  he  was  born  on  8th  November  1831,  and  after  going 
to  Harrow,  but  not  to  either  university,  entered  the  diplomatic 
service  at  the  age  of  eighteen.  In  this  he  filled  a  great  many 
different  offices  at  a  great  many  different  places  for  nearly  thirty 
years,  till,  after  succeeding  to  his  father's  title,  he  was  made  First 
Minister  at  Lisbon,  and  then  in  1876  Viceroy  of  India.  This 
post  he  gave  up  in  1880,  and  after  the  return  of  the  Tory  party 
to  power,  was  sent  in  1887  as  Ambassador  to  Paris,  where  he 
was  very  popular,  and  where  he  died  in  1892. 

Despite  the  fact  that  his  time,  save  for  the  interval  of  1880-87, 
was  thus  uninterruptedly  occupied  with  business,  Lord  Lytton 
was  an  indefatigable  writer  of  verse ;  while  in  The  Ring  of 
Amasis  he  tried  the  prose  romance.  His  chief  poetical  books 
were  Clytemnestra  (1855)  ;  The  Wanderer  (1859),  which  contains 
some  charming  lyrical  work;  Lucile  (1860),  averse  story;  Songs 
of  Senna  (Serbski  Pesme)  (1861);  Orval,  or  the  Fool  of  Time 
and  Chronicles  and  Characters  (1869);  Fables  in  Song  (1874); 
Glenaveril,  a  very  long  modern  epic  (1885);  and  After  Paradise, 
or  Legends  of  Exile  (1887).  Besides  these  he  collaborated  in 
1 86 1  with  his  friend  Julian  Fane  in  a  poem,  Tannhauser,  which, 


THE  EARL  OF  LYTTON  319 


though  too  much  of  a  Tennysonian  echo,  has  good  passages  ;  and 
after  his  death  two  volumes  equal  if  not  superior  to  anything  he 
had  done,  Marah,  a  collection  of  short  poems,  and  King  Poppy, 
a  fantastic  epic,  were  published.  This  extensive  and  not  always 
easily  accessible  work  is  conveniently  represented  by  two  volumes 
of  selections,  one  representing  chiefly  the  earlier  and  shorter  works, 
edited  by  Miss  Betham-Edwards  in  1890,  the  other  drawn  mostly 
from  the  later  and  longer,  edited  by  his  daughter,  Lady  Betty 
Balfour,  in  1894.  This  latter  was  accompanied  by  reprints  of  The 
Wanderer  and  Lucile. 

The  difficulties  in  criticism  above  referred  to  arise,  not  merely 
from  the  voluminousness  of  this  work,  nor  from  the  fact  that  Lord 
Lytton  shares  with  all  the  poets  of  his  special  generation,  except 
Rossetti,  that  inability  to  hit  upon  a  definite  and  distinct  manner 
of  his  own  which  is  so  frequently  and  strangely  remarkable  in 
what  may  be  called  intermediate  poetical  periods.  Indeed  in 
his  later  years  he  did  strike  out  something  like  a  very  distinct 
style.  But  he  suffers  more  than  any  other  poet  of  anything  like 
his  gifts  from  two  faults,  one  of  which  is  perhaps  the  fault  that 
hurts  a  poet  most  with  the  vulgar,  and  the  other  that  which  does 
him  most  harm  with  critics.  He  was  so  frankly  pleased  with, 
and  so  apt  at  imitating,  the  work  of  his  great  contemporaries, 
that  he  would  publish  things  to  which  fools  gave  the  name  of 
plagiarisms — when  they  were  in  fact  studies  in  the  manner  of 
Tennyson,  Heine,  Browning,  and  others.  And  in  the  second 
place,  though  he  frequently  rewrote,  it  seemed  impossible  for  him 
to  retrench  and  concentrate.  To  this  may  be  added  his  fond- 
ness for  extremely  long  narrative  poems,  the  taste  for  which  has 
certainly  gone  out,  while  it  may  be  doubted  whether,  unless  they 
are  pure  romances  of  adventure,  they  are  ever  good  things. 

The  consequence  of  all  this,  and  perhaps  of  other  things  less 
legitimately  literary,  such  as  political  partnership,  has  hitherto 
been  that  Lord  Lytton  has  been  ranked  very  far  indeed  below 
his  proper  place.  For  he  had  two  poetical  gifts,  the  higher  of 
them  in  a  high,  the  lower  in  an  eminent  degree.  The  first  was 


320  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

the  gift  of  true  lyric,  not  seldom  indeed  marred  by  the  lack  ot 
polish  above  noticed,  but  real,  true,  and  constant,  from  the 
<:  Fata  Morgana "  and  "  Buried  Heart "  of  The  Wanderer  to 
the  "  Experientia  Uocet "  and  "  Selenites  "  of  Marah,  more  than 
thirty  years  later.  The  other  was  a  much  more  individual  power, 
and  by  some  might  be  ranked  higher.  It  is  the  gift  of  what  can 
best  generally  be  called  ironical  narration,  using  irony  in  its 
proper  sense  of  covert  suggestive  speech.  This  took  various 
forms,  indicated  with  more  or  less  clearness  in  the  very  titles 
of  Chronicles  and  Characters  and  Fables  in  Song,- — symbolic- 
mystical  in  Legends  of  Exile  (where  not  only  some  of  the  legends, 
but  the  poems  called  "  Uriel "  and  "  Strangers  "  are  among  the 
best  things  of  the  author  and  highly  typical  of  his  later  manner), 
and  fantastically  romantic,  with  a  strong  touch  of  symbolism,  in 
King  Poppy.  And  when,  as  happens  in  most  of  the  pieces  men- 
tioned above  and  many  others,  the  combination  welds  itself  into  a 
kind  of  passionate  allegory,  few  poets  show  a  better  power  of 
transporting  the  reader  in  the  due  poetic  manner.  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  if  Lord  Lytton  had  developed  this  faculty  some- 
what earlier  (there  are  traces  of  it  very  early),  had  made  its  exercises 
rather  more  clear  and  direct,  and  had  subjected  their  expression 
to  severer  thinning  and  compression,  he  would  have  made  a  great 
reputation  as  a  poet.  As  it  is,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  he  had 
the  positive  faculties  of  poetry  in  kind  and  degree  only  inferior 
to  those  possessed  by  at  most  four  or  five  of  his  English  con- 
temporaries from  Tennyson  downwards. 

Two  other  poets — each  remarkable  in  his  way,  if  neither  of  the 
absolutely  first  rank  —  have  passed  to  the  majority  since  the 
second  impression  of  this  book.  The  elder  and  the  last  to  die, 
Coventry  Patmore  (1823-96),  was  one  of  those  writers,  neither 
absolutely  unknown  nor  very  common,  who  present  two  phases  of 
poetry  almost  sufficiently  distinct  to  excuse  a  critic  if,  in  the 
absence  of  positive  information,  he  should  think  them  incom- 
patible in  a  single  personality.  He  was  the  son  of  a  friend  of 
Hazlitt  who  had  figured  not  too  advantageously  in  the  fatal 


MINOR  POETS 


Scott-Christie  duel ;  and  while  he  was  still  pretty  young  he  pro- 
duced, in  1854,  a  poem  called  The  Angel  in  the  House,  which  was 
understood  to  be  at  least  in  part  the  outcome  of  personal  ex- 
perience, It  was  in  octosyllabic  couplets — extremely  fluent, 
very  easy  and  soft,  but  a  little  flaccid  in  texture,  with  a  flaccidity 
also  sometimes  apparent  in  its  own  celebration  of  the  domestic 
affections,  as  well  as  in  some  minor  poems  which  have  usually 
accompanied  it.  Very  much  later — in  the  last  twenty  years 
of  his  life,  from  1877  onwards — Mr.  Patmore  published  some 
poems,  chiefly  in  ode  form,  of  an  entirely  different  stamp — severe 
in  versification,  almost  rugged  in  diction  now  and  then,  and 
ambitiously  aimed  in  sense.  These  were  undoubtedly  fine  in 
parts,  and  have  been  rather  extravagantly  praised,  partly  owing 
to  sufficiently  transparent  reasons  of  coterie  sympathy  not  directly 
connected  with  literature.  But  his  very  best  work  as  a  poet  still 
floats  here  and  there  on  the  mild  mare  magnum  of  The  Angel  in 
the  House. 

The  other,  Lord  De  Tabley,  better  known  for  the  many  years 
before  he  succeeded  to  the  title  as  Mr.  Leicester  Warren,  and  for 
a  time  by  the  nom  de  guerre  of  "Lancaster,"  was  born  in  1835, 
and  died  sixty  years  later.  For  years  Mr.  Warren — who  had 
rather  wide  tastes  and  acquirements  in  science  and  art  as  well  as 
in  literature,  and  a  strongly  marked  character — published  verse 
(the  best  and  rarest  piece  of  it,  The  Soldier's  Fortune,  1874)  which 
passed  almost  entirely  without  notice.  At  last,  as  often  happens 
in  the  literary  sphere,  his  "house  came  round  to  him"  at  the 
publication,  in  1893  and  in  the  year  of  his  death,  of  two  volumes 
of  Poems  Dramatic  and  Lyrical,  which  received  a  welcome  not 
too  far  below  their  deserts.  The  supreme  test  of  inevitableness 
may  perhaps  be  too  hard  for  him,  but  he  can  pass  most  others. 

Nor  should  there  perhaps  lack  mention  of  Roden  Noel  and 
Thomas  Ashe,  two  writers  in  whom,  from  their  earlier  work,  it 
was  not  unreasonable  to  expect  poets  of  a  distinct  kind,  and 
who,  though  they  never  improved  on  this  early  work,  can  never 
be  said  exactly  to  have  declined  from  it.  The  first  and  elder 

Y 


322  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

was  a  son  of  the  Earl  of  Gainsborough,  was  born  in  1834,  went 
to  Cambridge,  travelled  a  good  deal,  and  at  various  times,  till 
his  death  at  the  age  of  sixty,  published  much  verse  and  not  a 
little  prose,  both  showing  a  distinctly  poetical  imagination  without 
a  sufficient  organ  of  expression.  Nor  did  he  ever  develop  this 
except  in  A  Little  Child's  Monument,  where  the  passionate 
personal  agony  injures  as  much  as  it  helps  the  poetical  result. 
Mr.  Ashe,  who  was  born  in  1836,  and  died  in  1889,  also  a 
Cambridge  man,  had  a  much  less  ambitious  and  rather 
less  interesting  but  somewhat  better- organised  talent  for  verse, 
and  his  Sorrows  of  Hypsipyle,  published  in  1866.  caused,  and 
authorised,  at  the  time  considerable  expectations  from  him.  But 
his  vein  was  rather  the  result  of  classical  culture  working  on  a 
slight  original  talent  than  anything  better,  and  he  did  not  rise 
beyond  a  pleasant  competence  in  verse  which  was  never  that 
of  a  poetaster,  but  hardly  ever  that  of  a  distinct  poet.  In  which 
respect  he  may  appear  here  as  the  representative  of  no  scanty 
company  dead  and  living.  For  even  the  longest  chapter  of  a 
book  must  have  an  end ;  and  it  is  impossible  to  find  room  now 
for  the  discussion  of  the  question,  whether  the  friends  of  Oliver 
Madox  Brown,  son  of  the  famous  Prae-Raphaelite  painter,  were  or 
were  not  wrong  in  seeing  extraordinary  promise  in  his  boyish 
work;  whether  the  sonnets  of  Ernest  Lefroy  (1855-91)  were 
exercises  or  works  of  art.  A  few  more  remarks  on  humorous 
poets  and  women-poets  must  close  the  record. 

In  the  art  of  merely  or  mainly  humorous  singing  two  names, 
those  of  Edward  Lear  and  Charles  Stuart  Calverley  ("  C.  S.  C."), 
dominate  the  rest  among  dead  writers  in  the  last  part  of  the  century. 
Lear,  a  good  deal  the  elder  man  of  the  two,  was  born  in' 1813, 
was  a  painter  by  profession,  and  was  the  "  E.  L.v  of  a  well-known 
poem  of  Tennyson's.  It  was  not  till  1861  that  his  delightful 
nonsense -verses,  known  to  his  friends  in  private,  were  first 
published,  and  they  received  various  additions  at  intervals  till 
his  death  in  1888.  The  sheer  nonsense-verse — the  amphigouri 
as  the  French  call  it  — -has  been  tried  in  various  countries  and  at 


MINOR  POETS  323 


various  times,  but  never  with  such  success  as  in  England,  and  it 
has  seldom,  if  ever,  been  cultivated  in  England  with  such  success 
as  by  Lear.  His  happy  concoction  of  fantastic  names,  the  easy, 
slipping  flow  of  his  verse,  and  above  all,  the  irresistible  parody 
of  sense  and  pathos  that  he  contrived  to  instil  into  his  rigmarole 
are  unapproachable.  In  a  new  and  not  in  the  least  opprobrious 
sense  he  was  "within  the  realms  of  Nonsense  absolute." 

Calverley  attempted  less  "  uttermost  isles  "  of  fun.  Born  in 
1831  of  an  excellent  Yorkshire  family,  he  was  educated  at 
Harrow,  and — a  thing  as  rare  in  the  nineteenth  as  common  in 
the  seventeenth  century — at  both  universities,  gaining  at  both  a 
great  reputation  for  scholarship,  eccentricity,  and  bodily  strength. 
After  some  time  he  married  and  began  to  work  at  the  Bar ;  but 
an  accident  on  the  ice  in  1867  brought  on  concussion  of  the 
brain,  though  he  lingered  in  constantly  weakening  health  till 
1884.  His  Verses  and  Translations  twenty-two  years  earlier  had 
made  him  the  model  of  all  literary  undergraduates  with  a  turn  for 
humour ;  and  he  was  able  in  spite  of  his  affliction  to  issue  some 
things  later,  the  chief  being  Fly -Leaves  in  1872.  Calverley,  as 
has  been  said,  was  a  scholar,  and  his  versions  both  from  and 
into  the  classical  languages  would  of  themselves  have  given  him 
a  reputation ;  but  his  forte  lay  partly  in  the  easier  vein  of  parody, 
wherein  few  excelled  him,  partly  in  the  more  difficult  one  of 
original  light  verse,  wherein  he  had  a  turn  (as  in  his  famous 
eulogy  on  tobacco)  quite  his  own.  He  has  never  been  equalled 
in  this,  or  even  approached,  except  by  James  Kenneth  Stephen 
(1859-92),  whose  premature  death  deprived  his  friends  of  a 
most  amiable  personality,  and  literature,  in  all  probability,  of  a 
considerable  ornament.  As  it  was,  "J.  K.  S."  left  next  to 
nothing  but  two  tiny  collections  of  verse,  showing  an  inspiration 
midway  between  Calverley  and  Praed,  but  with  quite  sufficient 
personal  note. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  Henry  Duff  Traill,  who  was  born  in 
1842  and  died  early  in  1900,  best  deserves  to  be  mentioned  here 
or  at  the  close  of  the  chapter  on  "Later  Journalism  and  Criticism." 


324  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD  CHAP. 

In  the  discharge  of  these  two  latter  functions,  especially  in  journal- 
ism pure  and  simple,  he  passed  most  of  his  time,  and  expended 
(as  some  would  say,  wasted)  powers  of  extraordinary  versatility 
and  strength.  Of  these  powers,  though  he  executed  some  excel- 
lent monographs  on  Coleridge,  Shaftesbury,  William  the  Third, 
Sterne,  Lord  Salisbury,  etc.,  the  best  memorial,  from  the  literary 
point  of  view,  is  the  very  remarkable  series  of  dialogues  called 
The  New  Lucian,  first  published  in  1884,  and  reissued  a  little 
before  the  author's  death.  It  may  be  said  emphatically,  that  to 
some  who  had  known  Mr.  Traill  himself  long,  and  who  were  not 
unacquainted  with  most  of  his  compeers,  he  seemed,  for  com- 
bination of  depth,  versatility,  and  vigour,  the  ablest  journalist 
and  one  of  the  ablest  critics  of  his  time.  But,  for  absolute  distinc- 
tion, his  verse  achievements  perhaps  surpassed  his  prose.  Com- 
paratively few  of  them  have  been  rescued  in  book  form  {Recap- 
tured Rhymes,  1882  ;  Saturday  Songs,  1890)  from  the  unsunned 
caverns  of  old  newspapers.  But  their  wonderful  diabk  au  corps, 
the  deftness  of  their  technical  manipulation,  their  knowledge  of 
literature,  politics,  life,  and,  above  all,  their  inexhaustible  and 
incalculable  humour  and  wit,  put  them  in  the  right  succession 
of  Canning  and  Moore  and  Praed,  with  no  small  claim  to  be 
served  heirs  also  to  more  than  a  fringe  or  skirt  of  the  mantle  of 
Swift  and  of  Aristophanes. 

Two  other  writers  of  less  scholarly  style,  but  belonging  to 
the  London  Bohemian  school  ot  the  third  quarter  of  the 
century,  W.  J.  Prowse,  "Nicholas"  (1836-70),  and  H  S. 
Leigh  (1837-83),  may  be  noticed.  Prowse,  whose  career  was 
very  short,  was  the  author  of  the  charming  lines  on  "  The 
beautiful  City  of  Prague,"  which  have  been  attributed  to 
others ;  while  Leigh's  Carols  of  Cockayne  (he  was  also  a  play- 
wright) vary  the  note  of  Hood  happily,  and  now  and  then  with  a 
real  originality. 

Except  Miss  Rossetti,  no  woman  during  this  time  approached 
the  poetical  excellence  of  Mrs.  Barrett  Browning.  But  the 
whole  period  has  been  unprecedentedly  fertile  in  poetesses, 


MINOR  POETS  325 


and  whereas  we  had  but  five  or  six  to  mention  in  the  earlier 
chapter  devoted  to  verse,  we  have  now  at  least  a  dozen,  though 
no  one  who  requires  very  extended  notice  here.  Lady  Dufferin 
(1807-1867),  mother  of  the  well-known  diplomatist,  a  member  of 
the  Sheridan  family,  and  her  sister,  and  junior  by  a  year,  Mrs. 
Norton  (1808-1876),  were  both  writers  of  facile  and  elegant  verse, 
with  the  Irish  note  of  easy  melody.  The  former  was  the  less 
known  to  the  general  reader,  though  a  few  of  her  pieces,  such  as 
"  The  Irish  Emigrant "  and  "  Katie's  Letter,"  have  always  been 
favourite  numbers  for  recitation.  Mrs.  Norton  at  one  time 
enjoyed  a  considerable  reputation  as  a  poetess  by  contributions 
to  "  Annuals  "  and  "  Souvenirs,"  chiefly  in  the  sentimental  ballad 
style  which  pleased  the  second  quarter  of  the  century.  "  The 
Outward  Bound,"  "  Bingen  on  the  Rhine,"  and  other  things  are 
at  least  passable ;  and  one  of  the  author's  latest  and  most  ambitious 
poems,  The  Lady  of  La  Garaye,  has  a  sustained  respectability. 
To  a  few  fanatical  admirers  the  scanty  verse  of  Emily  Bronte 
has  seemed  worthy  of  such  high  praise  that  only  mass  of  work 
would  appear  to  be  wanting  to  put  her  in  the  first  rank  of 
poetesses,  if  not  of  poets.  Part  of  this,  however,  it  is  to  be  feared, 
is  due  to  admiration  of  the  supposed  freedom  of  thought  in  her 
celebrated  "  Last  Lines,"  which  either  in  sincerity  or  bravado 
pronounce  that  "  vain  are  the  thousand  creeds,"  and  declare  for 
a  sort  of  vague  Pantheism  immanent  at  once  in  self  and  the 
world.  At  thirty,  however,  a  genuine  poetess  should  have  pro- 
duced more  than  a  mere  handful  of  verse,  and  its  best  things 
should  be  independent  of  polemical  partisanship  either  for  or 
against  orthodoxy.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  her  exquisite  "  Remem- 
brance," and  the  slightly  rhetorical  but  brave  and  swinging 
epigram  of  "  The  Old  Stoic,"  give  her  better  claims  than  the 
"  Last  Lines,"  and  with  them  and  a  few  others  place  her  as  a 
remarkable,  though  not  by  any  means  a  supreme,  figure. 

The  more  prudent  admirers  of  Marian  Evans  (George  Eliot), 
who  wrote  a  good  deal  of  verse,  either  admit  that  her  verse  was 
not  poetry,  or  hold  up  a  much-quoted  passage,  "Oh,  may  I 


326  THE  SECOND  POETICAL  PERIOD 


join  the  choir  invisible,"  which,  like  the  far  superior  piece  just 
referred  to,  is  only  a  hymn  on  the  side  which  generally  dispenses 
with  hymns ;  and  not  a  very  good  one,  though  couched  in  fair 
Wordsworthian  blank  verse.  They  would  no  doubt  indulge  in 
derisive  scorn  at  the  idea  of  the  mild  muse  of  Adelaide  Anne 
Procter,  daughter  of  "  Barry  Cornwall,"  receiving  praise  denied 
to  Miss  Bronte  and  Miss  Evans ;  and  it  must  be  admitted  that 
Miss  Procter  never  did  anything  so  good  as  "  Remembrance."  On 
the  other  hand,  she  was  quite  free  from  the  "sawdust"  and 
heaviness  which  mar  George  Eliot's  verse.  Her  style  was  akin 
to  that  which  has  been  noticed  in  speaking  of  Mrs.  Norton, 
though  of  a  somewhat  later  fashion,  and  like  those  of  her  father, 
her  songs,  especially  the  famous  "  Message,"  had  the  knack  of 
suiting  composers.  Menella  Bute  Smedley  and  Dora  Greenwell, 
a  respectable  pair,  somewhat  older  than  Miss  Procter  (she  was 
born  in  1825  and  died  in  1864),  considerably  outlived  her,  Miss 
Smedley's  life  lasting  from  1820  to  1877,  and  Miss  GreenwelFs 
from  1821  to  1882.  Both  were  invalids,  and  soothed  their  cares 
with  verse,  the  latter  to  the  better  effect,  though  both  in  no 
despicable  strain.  Augusta  Webster  (1840-94)  and  Emily 
Pfeiffer  (  ?  -1890)  were  later  poetesses  of  the  same  kind,  but 
lower  rank,  though  both  were  greatly  praised  by  certain  critics. 
Sarah  Williams,  a  short-lived  writer  of  some  sweetness  (1841-68), 
commended  herself  chiefly  to  those  who  enjoy  verse  religious 
but  "  broad " ;  Constance  Naden  to  those  who  like  pessimist 
agnosticism ;  Amy  Levy  to  those  who  can  deplore  a  sad  fate  and 
admire  notes  few  and  not  soaring,  but  passionate  and  genuine. 

Later  than  these,  in  1897,  at  the  age  of  nearly  eighty,  died 
Jean  Ingelow,  who,  in  the  early  sixties,  had  published  a  volume 
of  Poems,  very  popular  in  its  day,  and  deserving  that  popularity 
by  the  singular  sweetness  and  melody  of  not  a  few  pieces,  and  the 
truth  and  not  maudlin  pathos  of  their  sentiment.  Miss  Ingelow 
did  good  work  both  in  verse  and  prose  afterwards. 


CHAPTER    VII 

THE   NOVEL    SINCE    1850 

CERTAIN  novelists  who  were  mentioned  at  the  end  of  Chapter  III., 
though  they  all  lived  far  into  the  last  half  of  the  century,  not  only 
belonged  essentially  to  its  first  division,  but  strictly  speaking  fell 
out  of  strict  chronological  arrangement  of  any  kind,  being  of  the 
class  of  more  or  less  eccentric  men  of  genius  who  may  appear  at 
any  time  and  belong  to  none  in  particular ;  and  certain  others 
of  the  earlier  time,  less  eccentric,  lived  on  far  towards  our  own. 
About  1850,  however,  a  little  before  or  a  little  after  it,  there 
appeared  a  group  of  novelists  of  great  talent,  and  in  some  cases 
of  genius  itself,  who  were  less  self-centred,  and  exemplified  to  a 
greater  degree  the  special  tendencies  of  the  time.  These  ten- 
dencies were  variously  connected  with  the  Oxford  or  Tractarian 
Movement ;  the  transfer  of  political  power  from  the  upper 
to  the  middle  classes  by  the  first  Reform  Bill ;  the  rise  of  what 
is  for  shortness  called  Science ;  the  greater  esteem  accorded  to 
and  the  more  general  practice  of  what  is,  again  for  shortness, 
called  Art ;  the  extension  in  a  certain  sense  of  education ;  the  re- 
engagement  of  England,  long  severed  from  Continental  politics,  in 
those  politics  by  the  Crimean  War ;  the  enormous  development  of 
commerce  by  the  use  of  steam  navigation  and  of  railways ;  the 
opening  up  of  Australia  and  its  neighbourhood ;  the  change 
effected  in  the  East  by  the  removal,  gradual  for  some  time,  then 
rapid  and  complete  after  the  Indian  Mutiny,  of  the  power  of  the 
East  India  Company;  and  the  "Liberal"  movement  generally. 


328  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP 

To  work  and  counterwork  out  the  influence  of  these  various 
causes  on  separate  authors,  and  the  connection  of  the  authors 
with  the  causes,  would  take  a  volume  in  itself.  But  on  the  scale 
and  within  the  limits  possible  here,  the  names  of  Charlotte 
Bronte,  Marian  Evans  (commonly  called  George  Eliot),  Charles 
Kingsley,  Anthony  Trollope,  and  Charles  Reade,  present  them- 
selves as  a  matter  of  course.  As  a  powerful,  distinct,  and  early 
compeer  of  theirs,  Mr.  George  Meredith  will  be  added  to  them, 
the  subject  of  a  liberty  similar  to  that  already  taken  with  Mr. 
Swinburne. 

The  members  of  this  group  were,  as  happens  with  a  repeated 
coincidence  in  literary  history  too  distinct  to  be  altogether 
neglected,  born  within  a  very  few  years  of  each  other  :  Reade 
in  1814,  Trollope  in  1815,  Miss  Bronte  next  year,  Kingsley 
and  Miss  Evans  in  1819  ;  but,  as  generally  happens  likewise,  their 
appearance  as  authors,  or  at  least  as  novelists,  did  not  follow  in 
exact  sequel.  The  first-renowned,  the  shortest-lived,  and  though  by 
no  means  the  most  brilliant  or  powerful,  in  a  certain  way  the 
freshest  and  most  independent,  was  Charlotte  Bronte,  the  daughter 
of  a  Yorkshire  clergyman  of  eccentric  and  not  altogether  amiable 
character  and  of  Irish  blood.  She  was  born  on  2ist  April  1816. 
The  origin  of  the  Bronte's  or  Pruntys  has,  as  well  as  their  family 
history  generally,  been  discussed  with  the  curiously  dispropor- 
tionate minuteness  characteristic  of  our  time  ;  but  hardly  anything 
need  be  said  of  the  results  of  the  investigation,  except  that  they 
were  undoubtedly  Irish.  Charlotte's  mother  died  soon  after  the 
Rev.  Patrick  Bronte  had  received  the  living  of  Haworth,  and 
Charlotte  herself  was  sent  to  school  at  a  place  called  Cowan's 
Bridge,  her  experiences  at  which  have  in  the  same  way  been  the 
subject  of  endless  inquiry  into  the  infinitely  little,  in  connection 
with  the  "  Lowood  "  of  Jane  Eyre.  After  two  of  her  sisters  had 
died,  and  she  herself  had  been  very  ill,  she  was  taken  away  and 
educated  partly  at  home,  partly  elsewhere.  Her  two  surviving 
sisters,  who  were  her  juniors,  Emily  by  two  years  and  Anne  by  four, 
were  both  of  more  or  less  literary  leanings,  and  as  they  were  all 


MISS  BRONTE  329 


intended  to  be  governesses,  the  sole  profession  for  poor  gentle- 
women in  the  middle  of  the  century,  Emily  and  Charlotte  were 
sent  to  Brussels  to  qualify.  In  1846  the  three  published  a  joint 
volume  of  Poems  under  the  pseudonyms  (which  kept  their  initials) 
of  Currer,  Ellis,  and  Acton  Bell,  and  to  people  over  middle  age 
Charlotte  Bronte  is  still  perhaps  most  familiar  as  Currer  Bell. 
Emily's  poems  are  elsewhere  commented  upon.  The  eldest  and 
youngest  sister  had  no  poetical  vocation,  and  Anne  had  not  much 
for  prose.  But  she,  with  the  others,  attempted  it  after  the  failure 
of  their  verse  in  a  triad  of  novels,  The  Professor,  by  Charlotte ; 
Wuthering  Heights  (very  much  praised  by  those  who  look  first  for 
unconventionality  and  force),  by  Emily ;  and  Agnes  Grey,  by 
Anne,  who  followed  it  with  The  Tenant  of  Wildfell  Hall.  But 
Charlotte  could  not  get  The  Professor  published — indeed  it 
is  anything  but  a  good  book — and  set  to  work  at  the  famous 
fane  Eyre,  which,  after  some  preliminary  difficulties,  was  ac- 
cepted by  Messrs.  Smith  and  Elder  and  published  in  1847, 
with  the  result  of  violent  attacks  and  very  considerable  popularity. 
Death  the  next  year  and  the  year  after  robbed  her  of  both  her 
sisters  and  of  her  brother  Patrick,  a  ne'er-do-weel,  who,  on  the 
strength  of  his  Bohemianism  and  his.,  sisters,  is  sometimes 
supposed  to  have  had  genius.  Shirley  appeared  in  1849,  and 
Villette  in  1852.  In  1854  Charlotte  married  her  father's  curate, 
Mr.  Nicholls,  but  died  next  year,  on  3ist  March  1855. 

Perhaps  the  most  interesting  way  of  looking  at  Charlotte 
Bronte,  who,  as  has  been  said,  has  been  violently  attacked  and  who 
has  also  been  extravagantly  praised  (though  not  so  extravagantly  as 
her  sister  Emily),  is  to  look  at  her  in  the  light  of  a  precursor  or 
transition -novelist,  representing  the  time  when  the  followers  of 
Scott  had  wearied  the  public  with  second-rate  romances,  when 
Thackeray  had  not  arisen,  or  had  only  just  arisen,  and  when  the 
modern  domestic  novel  in  its  various  kinds,  from  the  religious  to 
the  t problematic,  was  for  the  most  part  in  embryo,  or  in  very 
early  stages.  This  latter  novel  she  in  fact  anticipated  in 
many  of  its  kinds,  and  partly  to  the  fact  of  this  anticipation, 


330  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850 


partly  to  the  vividness  which  her  representation  of  personal 
experiences  gave  to  her  work,  may  the  popularity  which  it  at  first 
had,  and  such  of  it  as  has  survived,  be  assigned.  In  this  latter 
point,  however,  lay  danger  as  well  as  safety.  It  seems  very  im- 
probable that  if  Charlotte  Bronte  had  lived,  and  if  she  had 
continued  to  write,  her  stock  of  experiences  would  have  sufficed 
her ;  and  it  would  not  appear  that  she  had  much  else.  She  is 
indeed  credited  with  inventing  the  "  ugly  hero "  in  the  Mr. 
Rochester  of  Jane  Eyre,  but  in  the  long-run  ugliness  palls  almost 
as  much  as  beauty,  perhaps  sooner.  Except  in  touches  probably 
due  to  suggestions  from  Emily,  the  "weirdness"  of  the  younger 
sister  was  not  exhibited  by  the  elder.  The  more  melodramatic 
parts  of  the  book  would  not  have  borne  repetition,  and  its  main 
appeal  now  lies  in  the  Lowood  scenes  and  the  character  of  Jane 
herself,  which  are  both  admittedly  autobiographical.  So  also 
Shirley  is  her  sister  Emily,  the  curates  who  pester  her  appear  to 
have  been  almost  in  case  to  enter  libel  actions  if  they  thought 
proper,  and  Villette  is  little  more  than  an  embroidered  version  of 
the  Brussels  sojourn.  How  successful  an  appeal  of  this  kind  is 
the  experience  of  Byron  and  many  others  has  shown ;  how 
dangerous  it  is  could  not  be  better  shown  than  by  the  same 
experience.  It  was  Charlotte  Bronte's  good  fortune  that  she  died 
before  she  had  utterly  exhausted  her  vein,  though  those  .who  fail 
to  regard  Paul  Emanuel  with  the  affection  which  he  seems  to 
inspire  in  some,  may  think  that  she  went  perilously  near  it. 
But  fate  was  kind  to  her :  some  interesting  biographies  and 
brilliant  essays  at  different  periods  have  revived  and  championed 
her  fame  ;  and  her  books — at  leasty<z;?<?  Eyre  almost  as  a  whole  and 
parts  of  the  others — will  always  be  simply  interesting  to  the  novel- 
reader,  and  interesting  in  a  more  indirect  fashion  to  the  critic. 
For  this  last  will  perceive  that,  thin  and  crude  as  they  are,  they 
are  original,  they  belong  to  their  own  present  and  future,  not  to 
their  past,  and  that  so  they  hold  in  the  history  of  literature  a 
greater  place  than  many  books  of  greater  accomplishment  which 
are  simply  worked  on  already  projected  and  accepted  lines 


GEORGE  ELIOT  331 


Emily's  work,  though  too  small  in  bulk  and  too  limited  in 
character  to  be  put  really  high,  has  this  original  character  in 
intenser  quality. 

The  mantle  of  Charlotte  Bronte  fell  almost  directly  from  her 
shoulders  on  those  of  another  novelist  of  her  sex.  The  author  of 
fane  Eyre  died,  as  has  been  said,  in  the  spring  of  1855.  In  the 
autumn  of  the  next  year  was  written,  and  in  the  January  issue  of 
Blackwood's  Magazine  for  1857  appeared,  the  first  of  a  series  of 
Scenes  of  Clerical  Life.  The  author,  then  and  for  some  time 
afterwards  unknown,  was  Mary  Ann  or  Marian  Evans,  who  took 
various  styles  during  her  life,  but  wrote  habitually  under  the  nom 
de  guerre  of  "George  Eliot."  Miss  Bronte  had  not  been  a  very 
precocious  novelist ;  but  Miss  Evans  did  not  begin  to  write 
novels  till  she  was  nearly  as  old  as  Miss  Bronte  was  when  she  died. 
Her  time,  however,  had  been  by  no  means  wasted.  Born  on 
22nd  November  1819,  at  Arbury  in  Warwickshire,  where  her 
father  was  land-steward  to  Mr.  Newdigate,  she  moved,  after 
twenty  years'  life  in  the  country  or  at  school,  with  her  father  into 
Coventry,  and  became  acquainted  with  a  set  of  Unitarians  who 
had  practically  broken  all  connection  with  Christianity.  She 
accepted  their  opinions  with  the  curious  docility  and  reflexiveness 
which,  strong  as  was  her  mind  in  a  way,  always  distinguished  her ; 
and  as  a  sign  of  profession  she  undertook  the  translation  of 
Strauss's  Leben  Jesu.  In  1849  she  went  abroad,  and  stayed  for 
some  time  at  Geneva,  studying  hard,  and  not  returning  to  Eng- 
land till  next  year.  Then  establishing  herself  in  London,  she 
began  to  write  for  the  Westminster  Review,  which  she  helped  to 
edit,  and  translated  Feuerbach's  Wesen  dcs  Christenthums.  It  is 
highly  probable  that  she  would  never  have  been  known  except  as 
an  essayist  and  translator,  if  she  had  not  formed  an  irregular 
union  with  George  Henry  Lewes,  a  very  clever  and  versatile 
journalist,  who  was  almost  a  philosopher,  almost  a  man  of  science, 
and  perhaps  quite  a  man  of  letters  of  the  less  creative  kind. 
Under  his  influence  (he  had  been  a  novelist  himself,  though  an 
unsuccessful  one,  and  was  an  excellent  critic)  the  docility  above 


332  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

remarked  on  turned  itself  into  the  channel  of  novel-writing  with 
immediate  and  amazing  success. 

Some  good  judges  have  thought  that  Miss  Evans  never 
exceeded,  in  her  own  special  way,  the  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life.  But 
it  was  far  exceeded  in  popularity  by  Adam  Bede,  which,  oddly 
enough,  was  claimed  by,  or  at  least  for,  an  impostor  after  its 
triumphant  appearance  in  1858.  The  position  of  the  author  may 
be  said  to  have  been  finally  established  by  The  Mill  on  the  Floss 
(1860),  though  the  opening  part  of  Silas  Marner  J^i86i)  is  at  least 
equal  if  not  supenofTcTanything  she  ever  did.  Her  later  works 
»  were  Romola,  a  story  of  the  Italian  Renaissance  (1863);  Felix 
Holt,  the  Radical  (1866) ;  some  poems  (the  Spanish  Gypsy,  Jubal, 
etc.,  1868-1874);  Middlemarch  (1871);  and  Daniel Deronda  (1876). 
This  last  was  followed  by  a  volume  of  essays  entitled  the  Impres- 
sions of  Thcophrastus  Such.  Mr.  Lewes  having  died  in  1878, 
Miss  Evans,  in  May  1880,  married  Mr.  John  Cross,  and  died 
herself  in  December  of  the  same  year.  Her  Life  and  Letters 
were  subsequently  published  by  her  husband,  but  the  letters 
proved  extremely  disappointing  to  her  admirers,  and  the  life  was 
not  very  illuminative,  except  as  to  that  docility  and  capacity  for 
taking  colour  and  pressure  from  surroundings  which  have  been 
noticed  above. 

As  a  poet  George  Eliot  has  been  noticed  elsewhere.  She 
merely  put  some  of  the  thoughtful  commonplaces  of  her  time  and 
school  into  wooden  verse,  occasionally  grandiose,  but  never  grand, 
and  her  purple  passages  have  the  purple  of  plush,  not  of  velvet. 
Nor  is  she  very  remarkable  as  an  essayist,  though  some  of  her 
early  articles  have  merit,  and  though  Theophrastus  Such,  appearing 
at  a  time  when  her  general  hold  on  the  public  was  loosening,  not 
commending  itself  in  form  to  her  special  admirers,  and  injured  in 
parts  by  the  astonishing  pseudo-scientific  jargon  which  she  had 
acquired,  was  received  rather  mare  coldly  than  it  deserved. 
But  as  a  novelist  she  is  worthy  of  careful  attention.  Between 
1860  and  1870,  a  decade  in  which  Thackeray  passed  away  early 
and  during  which  Dickens  did  no  first-class  work,  she  had  some 


vii  GEORGE  ELIOT  333 

claims  to  be  regarded  as  the  chief  English  novelist  who  had  given 
much  and  from  whom  more  was  to  be  expected ;  after  Dickens's 
death  probably  four  critics  out  of  five  would  have  given  her  the 
place  of  greatest  English  novelist  without  hesitation.  Neverthe- 
less, even  from  the  first  there  were  dissidents  ;  while  at  the 
time  of  the  issue  of  Middlemarch  her  fame  was  at  the  very 
highest,  the  publication  of  Daniel  Deronda  made  it  fall  rapidly, 
and  a  considerable  reaction  (perhaps  to  be  reversed,  perhaps  not) 
has  set  in  against  her  since  her  death. 

The  analysis  of  George  Eliot's  genius  is  indeed  exceedingly 
curious.  There  are  in  her  two  currents  or  characters  which  are  more 
or  less  mingled  in  all  her  books,  but  of  which  the  one  dominates  in 
those  up  to  and  including  Silas  Marner,  while  the  other  is  chiefly 
noticeable  in  those  from  Romola  onward.  The  first,  the  more 
characteristic  and  infinitely  the  more  healthy  and  happy,  is  a  quite 
extraordinary  faculty  of  humorous  observation  and  presentation 
of  the  small  facts  and  oddities  of  (especially  provincial)  life.  The 
Scenes  of  Clerical  Life  show  this  strongly,  together  with  a  fund  of 
untheatrical  pathos  which  scarcely  appears  in  so  genuine  a  form 
afterwards.  In  Adam  Bede  and  The  Mill  on  the  Floss  it  combines 
with  a  somewhat  less  successful  vein  of  tragedy  to  make  two 
admirable,  if  not  faultless,  novels;  it  lends  a  wonderful  charm 
to  the  slight  and  simple  study  of  Silas  Marner.  But,  abundant 
as  it  is,  it  would  seem  that  this  is  observation,  not  invention,  nor 
that  happiest  blending  of  observation  and  invention  which  we 
find  in  Shakespeare  and  Scott.  The  accumulated  experiences  of 
her  long  and  passive  youth  were  now  poured  out  with  a  fortunate 
result.  But  in  default  of  invention,  and  in  presence  of  the 
scientific  or  pseudo-scientific  spirit  which  was  partly  natural  to  her 
and  partly  imbibed  from  those  who  surrounded  her,  she  began, 
after  Silas  Marner,  to  draw  always  in  part  and  sometimes  mainly 
upon  quite  different  storehouses.  It  is  probable  that  the  selec- 
tion of  the  Italian  Renaissance  subject  of  Romola  was  a  very 
disastrous  one.  She  herself  said  that  she  "  was  a  young  woman 
when  she  began  the  book  and  an  old  one  when  she  finished  it." 


334  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP 

It  is  a  very  remarkable  tour  de  force,  but  it  is  a  four  de  force 
executed  entirely  against  the  grain.  It  is  not  alive:  it  is  a  work 
of  erudition,  not  of  genius — of  painful  manufacture,  not  of  joyous 
creation  or  even  observation.  And  this  note  of  labour  deepened 
and  became  more  obvious  even  when  she  returned  to  modern 
and  English  subjects,  by  reason  of  the  increased  "purpose" 
which  marked  her  later  works.  It  has  been  noted  by  all  critics 
of  any  perception  as  extremely  piquant,  though  not  to  careful 
students  of  life  and  letters  at  all  surprising,  that  George  Eliot, 
whose  history  was  always  well  known,  is  in  almost  every  one 
of  her  books  the  advocate  of  the  strictest  union  of  love  and 
marriage — no  love  without  maniage,  and  no  marriage  without 
love.  But  she  was  not  satisfied  with  defending  this  thesis, 
beneficial,  comparatively  simple,  and,  in  the  situations  which  it 
suggests,  not  unfriendly  to  art.  In  her  last  book,  Daniel  Deronda, 
she  embarked  on  a  scheme,  equally  hopeless  and  gratuitous,  of 
endeavouring  to  enlist  the  public  sympathies  in  certain  visions  of 
neo-Judaism.  In  all  these  books,  indeed,  even  in  Deronda,  the 
old  faculty  of  racy  presentation  of  the  humours  of  life  recurred. 
But  it  became  fainter  and  less  frequent ;  and  it  was  latterly 
obscured,  as  has  been  hinted,  by  a  most  portentous  jargon 
borrowed  from  the  not  very  admirable  lingo  of  the  philosophers 
and  men  of  science  of  the  last  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
All  these  things  together  made  the  later  books  conspicuously, 
what  even  the  earlier  had  been  to  some  extent,  lifeless  structures. 
They  were  constructed,  no  doubt,  with  much  art  and  of  material 
not  seldom  precious,  but  they  were  not  lively  growths,  and  they 
were  fatally  tinged  with  evanescent  "  forms  in  chalk,"  fancies  of 
the  day  and  hour,  not  less  ephemeral  for  being  grave  in  subject 
and  seeming,  and  almost  more  jejune  or  even  disgusting  to 
posterity  on  that  account. 

Almost  as  much  of  the  time,  though  curiously  different  in  the 
aspects  of  it  which  he  represented,  was  Charles  Kingsley,  who  was 
born  in  the  same  year  as  George  Eliot,  on  the  iSth  of  June  1819. 
A  fanciful  critic  might  indulge  in  a  contrast  between  the  sober 


CHARLES  KINGSLEY  335 


though  not  exactly  dull  scenery  of  the  Midlands  which  saw  her 
birth,  and  that  of  the  most  beautiful  part  of  Devonshire  (Holne, 
on  the  south-eastern  fringe  of  Dartmoor)  where,  at  the  vicarage 
which  his  father  held,  Kingsley  was  born.  He  was  educated  at 
King's  College,  London,  and  Magdalene  College,  Cambridge,  took 
a  very  good  degree,  and  very  soon  after  his  appointment  to  the 
curacy  of  Eversley,  in  Hampshire,  became  rector  thereof  in  1844. 
He  held  the  living  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  dying  there  on  the  23rd 
January  1875.  ^  was  n°t>  however,  by  any  means  his  only  pre- 
ferment. In  1860  he  was  made  Professor  of  Modern  History 
at  Cambridge,  not  the  most  fortunate  of  appointments;  for,  with 
a  tendency  to  small  slips  in  fact  at  least  equal  to  that  of  his 
friend  and  brother-in-law  Mr.  Froude,  Kingsley,  though  capable 
of  presenting  separate  aspects  and  facets  of  the  past  admirably, 
had  not  the  general  historic  grasp  which  redeemed  Froude.  Nine 
years  later  he  resigned  the  post  and  was  made  a  Canon  of  Chester, 
while  in  1873  this  was  exchanged  for  a  Canonry  at  Westminster 
and  a  Chaplaincy  to  the  Queen.  Otherwise  Kingsley's  private  life 
was  happy  and  uneventful,  its  chief  incident  being  a  voyage  to 
the  West  Indies  (which,  though  unvisited,  he  had  long  before 
so  brilliantly  described)  in  1871. 

His  literary  work  was  very  large,  much  varied,  and  of  an 
excellence  almost  more  varied  than  its  kinds.  He  began,  of 
course,  with  verse,  and  his  Sainfs  Tragedy  (1848),  a  drama  on 
the  story  of  St.  Elizabeth  of  Hungary,  was  followed  by  shorter 
poems  (far  too  few)  at  different  times,  most  of  them  previous  to 
1858,  though  the  later  books  contain  some  charming  fragments, 
and  some  appeared  posthumously.  Of  all  men  who  have  written 
so  little  verse  during  as  long  a  life  in  our  time,  Kingsley  is  prob- 
ably the  best  poet.  The  Sainfs  Tragedy  is  a  little  "viewy" 
and  fluent.  But  in  Andromeda  he  has  written  the  very  best 
English  hexameters  ever  produced,  and  perhaps  the  only  ones 
in  which  that  alien  or  rebel  takes  on  at  least  the  semblance  of 
a  loyal  subject  to  the  English  tongue.  The  rise  of  the  breeze 
after  the  passage  of  the  Nereids,  the  expostulation  of  Andromeda 


THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850 


with  Perseus,  and  the  approach  of  the  monster,  are  simply  admir- 
able. "The  Last  Buccaneer"  and  "The  Red  King"  —  call  them 
"  Wardour  Street,"  as  some  critics  may  —  are  among  the  best  of 
their  kind;  and  scores  of  songs,  snatches,  etc.,  from  "The  Three 
Fishers  "  and  "  The  Starlings  "  of  a  very  early  date  to  the  "  When 
all  the  world  is  young  "  ballad  of  the  Water  Babies  and  the  post- 
humous fragment  in  rhyme  of  "Lorraine,  Lorraine,  Lorree  "  —  one  of 
the  triumphs  of  that  pure  poetry  which  has  the  minimum  of  mean- 
ing, yet  enough  —  are  of  extraordinary  vigour,  freshness,  and  charm. 
But  Kingsley  was  one  of  those  darlings  —  perhaps  the  rarest  — 
of  the  Muses  to  whom  they  grant  the  gift  not  only  of  doing  a  little 
poetry  exquisitely,  but  the  further  gift  of  abstaining  from  doing 
anything  ill  ;  and  he  seems  to  have  recognised  almost  at  once 
that  "  the  other  harmony,"  that  of  prose,  was  the  one  meant  for 
him  to  do  his  day's  work  in.  An  enthusiast  for  the  people,  and 
an  eager  disciple  of  Carlyle,  he  produced  in  the  fateful  year  1849 
two  novels,  Alton  Locke  and  Yeast,  a  little  crude,  immature,  and 
violent,  but  of  wonderful  power  and  beauty  as  literature,  and 
putting  current  ideas  of  Chartism,  the  Tractarian  Movement,  the 
woes  of  the  working  classes,  and  what  not,  with  that  most 
uncommon  touch  which  takes  out  of  the  expression  all  its  ephem- 
erality.  He  had  joined  Maurice  in  the  "Christian  Socialist" 
Movement,  and  was  a  frequent  newspaper  writer  in  the  same  sense 
as  that  of  his  novels  ;  while  he  soon  began  to  contribute  to  Fraser's 
Magazine  a  series  of  extremely  brilliant  essays,  since  collected  in 
various  forms,  on  literature,  scenery,  sport  (he  was  an  ardent 
fisherman),  and  things  in  general.  His  next  novel,  Hypatia,  is 
still  shot  with  Christian  Socialism,  but  is  much  less  crude  ;  and  a 
further  sobering  down  without  any  loss  of  force  appears  in  the 
great  Elizabethan  novel  of  Westward  Ho  !  usually,  and  perhaps 
rightly,  thought  his  masterpiece  (1855).  Two  Years  Ago  (1857), 
the  title  of  which  refers  to  the  Crimean  War,  is  much  more 
unequal,  and  exhibits  signs  of  a  certain  declension,  though  to  a 
level  still  very  high.  His  last  novel,  Hereward  the  \Vake  (1866), 
was  and  is  very  variously  judged. 


vii  CHARLES  KINGSLEY  337 

But  even  the  poems,  the  essays,  and  the  novels  do  not 
by  any  means  fill  up  the  list  of  the  results  of  Kingsley's 
activity.  He  was  a  constant,  and  at  his  best  a  very  good, 
sermon  writer  for  publication.  He  produced  in  the  first  flush  of 
the  rage  for  sea-shore  studies  (1854)  a  very  pleasant  little  book 
called  Glaucus ;  he  collected  some  of  his  historical  lectures  in 
The  Roman  and  the  Teuton  ;  and  he  wrote  in  1863  the  delightful 
nondescript  of  The  Water  Babies,  part  story,  part  satire,  part 
Rabelaisian  fatrasie,  but  almost  all  charming,  and  perhaps  the 
latest  book  in  which  his  powers  appear  at  their  very  best.  These 
powers,  as  exhibited  in  his  novels,  with  a  not  dissimilar  exhibition 
in  little  in  his  essays,  are  so  remarkable  that  in  certain  senses 
Kingsley  may,  with  a  little  kindness,  be  put  in  the  very  first  class 
of  English  novelists,  and  might  be  put  there  by  the  sternest 
critical  impartiality  were  it  not  for  his  concomitant  defects. 
These  defects  are  fairly  numerous,  and  they  are  unfortunately  of 
a  kind  not  likely  to  escape  attention.  He  was  a  rather  violent, 
though  a  very  generous  partisan,  and  was  perpetually  going  out 
of  his  way  to  provoke  those  on  the  other  side  by  "flings  "  of  this 
or  that  kind.  He  was  extremely  fond  of  arguing,  but  was  a  most 
poor  and  unhappy  logician.  One  of  the  best  known  and  most 
unfortunate  episodes  of  his  literary  life  was  the  controversy  into 
which  he  plunged  with  Newman  in  1864.  Kingsley  had  before 
on  various  occasions  spoken  enthusiastically  of  Newman's  genius 
and  character  :  the  reference  to  the  peculiar  estimate  of  truth  held 
by  some  Roman  Catholics,  and  approved,  or  supposed  to  be 
approved,  by  Newman,  which  was  the  text  for  the  latter's  wrath, 
was  anything  but  offensive,  and  it  afterwards  became  certain, 
through  the  publication  of  the  Apologia,  that  the  future  Cardinal, 
with  the  inspiration  of  a  born  controversialist,  had  simply  made 
Kingsley  the  handle  for  which  he  had  been  waiting.  A  very  little 
dialectical  skill  would  have  brought  Kingsley  out  of  the  contest 
with  honours  at  least  divided ;  but,  as  it  was,  he  played  like  a 
child  into  Newman's  hands,  and  not  only  did  much  to  re-establish 
that  great  man  in  public  opinion,  but  subjected  himself  at  the 

7. 


338  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850 


time,  and  to  some  extent  since,  to  an  obloquy  at  least  as  unjust 
as  that  which  had  rested  upon  Newman.  This  maladroitness 
appears  constantly  in  the  novels  themselves,  and  it  is  accompanied 
not  merely  by  the  most  curious  and  outrageous  blunders  in  fact 
(such  as  that  which  represents  Marlowe  as  dying  in  the  time  of 
James  the  First,  not  that  of  Elizabeth),  but  by  odd  lapses  of  taste 
in  certain  points,  and  in  some  (chiefly  his  later)  books  by  a  hap- 
hazard and  inartistic  construction. 

We  must,  of  course,  allow  for  these  things,  which  are  the  more 
annoying  in  that  they  are  simply  a  case  of  those  which  incuria 
fudit.  But  when  they  are  allowed  for,  there  will  remain  such  a 
gallery  of  scenes,  characters,  and  incidents,  as  few  English  novelists 
can  show.  The  best  passages  of  Kingsley's  description,  from 
Alton  Locke  to  Hereward,  are  almost  unequalled  and  certainly 
unsurpassed.  The  shadows  of  London  low  life  and  of  working- 
class  thought  in  Alton  Locke,  imitated  with  increasing  energy  for 
half  a  century,  have  never  been  quite  reached,  and  are  most 
brilliantly  contrasted  with  the  lighter  Cambridge  scenes.  Yeast, 
perhaps  the  least  general  favourite  among  his  books,  and  certainly 
the  crudest,  has  a  depth  of  passion  and  power,  a  life,  an  intensity, 
the  tenth  part  of  which  would  make  the  fortune  of  a  novel  now ; 
and  the  variety  and  brilliancy  of  Hypatia  are  equalled  by  its 
tragedy.  Unequal  as  Two  Years  Ago  is,  and  weak  in  parts,  it 
still  has  admirable  passages;  and  He-reward  if)  some  extent  recovers 
the  strange  panoramic  and  phantasmagoric  charm  of  Hypatia. 
But  where  Westward  Ho!  deserves  the  preference,  and  where 
Kingsley  vindicates  his  claim  to  be  the  author  not  merely  of 
good  passages  but  of  a  good  book,  is  in  the  sustained  passion  of 
patriotism,  the  heroic  height  of  adventure  and  chivalry,  which 
pervades  it  from  first  to  last.  Few  better  historical  novels  have 
ever  been  written  ;  and  though,  with  one  exception,  that  of  Salva- 
tion Yeo,  the  author  has  drawn  better  characters  elsewhere,  he 
has  nowhere  knitted  his  incidents  into  such  a  consistent  whole,  or 
worked  characters  and  scenes  together  into  such  a  genuine  and 
thorough  work  of  art. 


ANTHONY  TROLLOPE  339 


Anthony  Trollope,  one  of  the  most  typical  novelists  of  the 
century,  or  at  least  of  the  half-century,  in  England,  if  not  one  of 
the  greatest,  was  a  member  of  a  literary  family  whose  other 
members,  of  more  or  less  distinction,  may  for  convenience  sake 
best  be  mentioned  here.  Little  is  recorded  of  his  father,  who  was, 
however,  a  barrister,  and  a  Fellow  of  New  College,  Oxford.  But 
Anthony's  mother,  the  "  Mrs.  Trollope  "  of  two  generations  ago, 
who  was  born  a  Miss  Milton  in  1780,  was  herself  very  well  known 
in  print,  especially  by  her  novel  of  The  Widow  Barnaby  (1839), 
which  had  sequels,  and  by  her  very  severe  Domestic  Manners  of 
the  Americans,  which  appeared  in  1832,  after  she  had  qualified 
herself  to  write  it  by  a  three  years'  residence  in  the  United  States. 
She  wrote  a  great  deal  at  this  period,  and  survived  till  1863  ;  but 
her  work  hardly  survived  as  long  as  she  did.  It  has,  however, 
been  said,  and  not  without  justice,  that  much  of  the  more  vivid 
if  coarser  substance  of  her  younger  son's  humour  is  to  be  traced 
in  it.  The  elder  son,  Thomas  Adolphus,  who  was  bom  in  1810, 
and  lived  from  1841  for  some  half-century  onwards  in  Italy,  was 
also  a  prolific  novelist,  and  wrote  much  on  Italian  history ;  while 
perhaps  his  best  work  was  to  be  found  in  some  short  pieces,  com- 
bining history  with  a  quasi-fictitious  interest,  which  he  contributed 
to  the  periodicals  edited  by  Dickens. 

But  neither  mother  nor  elder  brother  could  vie  with  Anthony, 
who  was  born  in  1815,  was  educated  at  Winchester  and  Harrow, 
spent  the  greater  part  of  his  life  as  an  official  of  the  Post  Office, 
and  died  in  December  1882,  leaving  an  enormous  number  of 
novels,  which  at  one  time  were  the  most  popular,  or  almost  the 
most  popular,  of  their  day,  and  to  which  rather  fastidious  judges 
have  found  it  difficult  to  refuse  all  but  the  highest  praise. 
Almost  immediately  after  Trollope's  death  appeared  an  Auto- 
biography in  which,  with  praiseworthy  but  rather  indiscreet 
frankness,  he  detailed  habits  of  work  of  a  mechanical  kind,  the 
confession  of  which  played  into  the  hands  of  those  who  had 
already  begun  to  depreciate  him  as  a  mere  book-maker.  It  is 
difficult  to  say  how  many  novels  he  wrote,  persevering  as  he  did 


340  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

in  composition  up  to  the  very  time  of  his  death ;  and  it  is  certain 
that  the  productions  of  his  last  decade  were,  as  a  rule,  very  inferior 
to  his  best.  This  best  is  to  be  found  chiefly,  but  not  entirely,  in 
what  is  called  the  "  Barsetshire  "  series,  clustering  round  a  county 
and  city  which  are  more  or  less  exactly  Hampshire  and  Win- 
chester, beginning  in  1855  with  The  Warden,  a  good  but  rather 
immature  sketch,  and  continuing  through  Barchester  Towers 
(perhaps  his  masterpiece),  Doctor  Thorne,  Framley  Parsonage, 
and  The  Small  House  at  Allington  (the  two  latter  among  the  early 
triumphs  of  the  Cornhill  Magazine],  to  The  Last  Chronicle  of 
Barset  (1867),  which  runs  Barchester  Towers  very  hard,  if  it  does 
not  surpass  it.  Other  favourite  books  of  his  were  The  Three  Clerks, 
Orley  Farm,  Can  You  Forgive  Her,  and  Phineas  Finn — nor  does 
this  by  any  means  exhaust  the  list  even  of  his  good  books. 

It  has  been  said  that  Trollope  is  a  typical  novelist,  and  the 
type  is  of  sufficient  importance  to  receive  a  little  attention,  even  in 
space  so  jealously  allotted  as  ours  must  be.  The  novel  craved  by 
and  provided  for  the  public  of  this  second  period  (it  has  also 
been  said)  was  a  novel  of  more  or  less  ordinary  life,  ranging  from 
the  lower  middle  to  the  upper  class,  correctly  observed,  diversified 
by  sufficient  incident  not  of  an  extravagant  kind,  and  furnished 
with  description  and  conversation  not  too  epigrammatic,  but  natural 
and  fairly  clever.  This  norm  Trollope  hit  with  surprising  just- 
ness, and  till  the  demand  altered  a  little  or  his  own  hand  failed 
(perhaps  there  was  something  of  both)  he  continued  to  hit  it. 
His  interests  and  experiences  were  fairly  wide  ;  for,  besides  being 
active  in  his  Post  Office  duties  at  home  and  abroad,  he  was 
an  enthusiastic  fox-hunter,  fairly  fond  of  society  and  of  club-life, 
ambitious  enough  at  least  to  try  other  paths  than  those  of  fiction 
in  his  Thackeray  (a  failure),  his  Cicero  (a  worse  failure),  and  other 
things.  And  everything  that  he  saw  he  could  turn  into  excellent 
novel-material.  No  one  has  touched  him  in  depicting  the 
humours  of  a  public  office,  few  in  drawing  those  of  cathedral  cities 
and  the  hunting- field.  If  his  stories,  as  stories,  are  not  of 
enthralling  interest  or  of  very  artfully  constructed  plots,  their 


vii  CHARLES  READE  341 

craftsmanship  in  this  respect  leaves  very  little  to  complain  of. 
And  he  can  sometimes,  as  in  the  Stanhope  family  of  Barchester 
Towers,  in  Mrs.  Proudie  passim,  in  Madalina  Uemolines,  and  in 
others,  draw  characters  very  little  removed  from  those  who  live 
with  us  for  ever.  It  is  extremely  improbable  that  there  will  ever 
be  a  much  better  workman  of  his  own  class ;  and  his  books  are 
certainly,  at  their  best,  far  better  than  all  but  one  or  two  that 
appear,  not  merely  in  any  given  year  nowadays,  but  in  any  given 
lustrum.  Yet  the  special  kind  of  their  excellence,  the  facts  that 
they  reflect  their  time  without  transcending  it,  and  that  in  the 
way  of  merely  reflective  work  each  time  prefers  its  own  workmen, 
and  is  never  likely  to  find  itself  short  of  them,  together  with  the 
great  volume  of  Trollope's  production,  are  certainly  against  him , 
and  it  is  hard  even  for  those  who  enjoyed  him  most,  and  who 
can  still  enjoy  him,  to  declare  positively  that  there  is  enough  of 
the  permanent  and  immortal  in  him  to  justify  the  hope  of  a 
resurrection. 

In  Charles  Reade,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  undoubtedly 
something  of  this  permanent  or  transcendent  element,  though 
less  perhaps  than  some  fervent  admirers  of  his  have  claimed.  He 
was  born  on  June  1814  at  Ipsden  in  Oxfordshire,  where  his  family 
had  been  some  time  seated  as  squires.  He  had  no  public  school 
education,  but  was  elected  first  to  a  Demyship  and  then  to  a 
Fellowship  at  Magdalen  College,  Oxford.  He  was  called  to  the 
Bar  in  1842;  but  his  Fellowship  made  him  independent,  and  he 
pursued  many  crazes — he  was  one  of  the  most  eccentric  of  those 
English  authors  who  are  noticed  in  this  volume — but  no  profession. 
He  did  not  even  begin  to  write  very  early,  and  when  he  did  it 
was  drama,  not  prose  or  fiction.  He  was  not  very  successful  with 
the  stage,  though  he  never  quite  gave  it  up.  It  was  about  1852 
when  he  began  to  write,  or  at  least  to  publish,  novels  ;  and  between 
the  Peg  Woffington  of  that  year  and  his  death  on  ist  April  1884 
he  produced  nearly  a  score,  diversifying  the  publication  with  law- 
suits, eccentric  newspaper  correspondences,  and  other  things. 
Indeed  he  has  in  more  than  one  of  his  books  introduced  mental 


.142  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

delusions  with  such  startling  subtlety  and  truth,  and  was  so  entirely 
odd  in  the  ordinary  relations  of  life,  that  some  have  not  hesitated 
to  insinuate  a  slight  want  of  sanity. 

If  there  was  any  madness  in  him,  the  hackneyed  alliance  of 
great  wits  was  certainly  not  refused.  A  novelist  of  violent  likes 
and  dislikes  himself,  he  has  found  violent  partisans  and  scornful 
pooh-poohers.  Among  the  former  there  is  perhaps  hardly  one  of 
his  chief  books — the  quaint  and  brilliant  Peg  Woffington,  the 
pathetic  Christie  Johnstone,  Hard  Cash,  Griffith  Gaunt,  Put 
Yourself  in  his  Place,  A  Terrible  Temptation,  and  the  rest — which 
has  not  special  sectaries.  But  catholic  criticism  would  undoubtedly 
put  It  is  Never  too  Late  to  Mend  (1856)  and  The  Cloister  and  the 
Hearth  (1861)  at  the  head  of  all.  The  former  is  a  tale  of  the 
moment,  based  chiefly  on  some  stories  which  had  got  abroad  of 
tyranny  in  gaols,  and  on  the  Australian  gold  fever  of  a  few  years 
earlier.  The  latter  is  a  pure  romance,  purporting  to  tell  the 
adventures  of  Erasmus's  father  in  the  fifteenth  century.  The 
contrast  of  these  subjects  illustrates  admirably  a  curious  combina- 
tion in  Reade's  genius  which,  for  the  matter  of  that,  might  be 
independently  exemplified  from  either  book.  On  the  one  side 
he  was  one  of  the  earliest  and  one  of  the  most  industrious  of  those 
who  have  been  called  the  "document"  or  "reporter"  novelists — 
now  collecting  enormous  stores  of  newspaper  cuttings  and  busying 
himself  with  keenest  interest  in  the  things  of  the  day  ;  now,  as  in 
The  Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  not  disdaining  to  impart  realism 
and  vividness  to  his  pictures  by  adapting  and  almost  translating 
whole  passages  from  Erasmus's  own  Colloquies.  On  the  other  he 
was  a  poetic  seer  and  dreamer,  of  the  strongest  romantic  force, 
and  capable  of  extraordinary  flights  of  power,  passion,  and  pathos. 
But  there  was  another  thing  that  he  was  not,  and  that  was  a 
critic.  His  taste  and  judgment  were  extremely  deficient ;  he  had 
no  sense  of  general  proportion  in  his  work,  and  was  quite  as 
likely  to  be  melodramatic  as  to  be  tragical,  to  be  coarse  as  to  be 
strong,  to  be  tedious  as  to  be  amusing,  to  be  merely  revolting  as 
to  purify  by  pity  and  terror.  Both  the  books  just  specially 


MR.  MEREDITH  343 


mentioned  may  be  thought  too  long  ;  it  is  certain  that  The  Cloister 
and  the  Hearth  is.  That  a  freshness  still  evident  in  Christie 
fohnstone  has  been  lost  in  both  (having  been  killed  by  "  the 
document ")  is  also  true.  But  still,  Reade  undoubtedly  had 
genius,  and  to  genius  most  things  can  without  much  trouble  be 
forgiven. 

Mr.  George  Meredith  (with  whom,  by  leave  of  a  new  century, 
we  take  the  same  license  as  formerly  with  Mr.  Ruskin,  and  now 
with  Mr.  Swinburne,  introducing  him  during  his  lifetime)  was 
not  long  behind  this  group,  though  he  was  a  much  younger  man 
than  most  of  them.  It  so  happened,  too,  that  he  might,  if  he  had 
chosen,  have  been  earlier  still ;  for  his  first  work  was  not  given 
to  prose  fiction.  Born  in  1828,  and  educated  abroad,  he 
published,  as  early  as  1851,  a  volume  of  Poems  which  became 
extremely  rare,  and  perhaps  deserved  the  forbidden  quotation 
about  "  caviare  "  even  more  than  the  earliest  work  of  Browning, 
and  almost  as  much  as  almost  all  the  work  of  Beddoes.  He 
followed  this  up,  in  1855,  with  the  less  really  puzzling,  because 
more  obviously  eccentric,  Shaving  of  Shagpat,  and  in  1857  by 
the  short  story  of  farina.  After  some  interval,  he  returned  to 
verse  in  Modern  Love  (1862),  and  after  a  much  longer  one,  printed 
and  reprinted  poems  several  times,  beginning  again  with  Poems 
and  Lyrics  of  the  Joy  of  Earth  in  1883.  But  not  much  need  be 
said  of  his  poetic  performance  here.  It  reproduces,  in  a  way 
difficult  to  parallel  in  any  other  English  writer  except  Landor, 
the  peculiarities  of  his  prose  work,  the  long  series  of  pre-eminently 
remarkable  novels  which  began  for  good  with  The  Ordeal  oj 
Richard  feverel  in  1859.  "  For  good  ;;  in  its  literal  as  well  as  in 
its  familiar  sense ;  but  not,  till  after  a  long  time,  for  popularity. 
Indeed,  if  Mr.  Meredith  had  been  writing  for  bread,  his  novels, 
strong  and  fresh  as  they  were,  would  scarcely  have  given  it  to 
him.  The  remarkableness  of  Richard  Feverel  itself  could  hardly 
have  escaped,  even  at  the  time  of  its  appearance,  the  youngest 
reader  who  had  any  native  taste  for  literature,  and  it  certainly  did 
not  escape  some  pretty  young  readers.  But  to  such,  unless  they 


344  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

were  prodigies  of  precocity,  it  must  have  been,  and  to  many 
much  older  readers  who  were  not  prodigies  of  dulness  it  was,  only 
in  part  intelligible.  Nor,  perhaps,  were  all  the  parts  that  were 
intelligible  attractive.  The  charge  of  obscurity  in  its  proper 
sense  belonged,  and  belongs,  very  much  more  to  Mr.  Meredith's 
work  than  to  that — so  obviously  to  be  compared  with  it  in 
character  and  fortunes — of  Mr.  Browning.  It  is  a  sort  of  trinity 
of  obscurity,  extending  not  merely  to  thought  and  style,  but  to 
the  conduct  of  story  and  character.  That  it  does  not,  in  any  of 
the  three,  proceed  from  mere  inability  or  defect  is  certain  ;  for, 
when  he  chose,  Mr.  Meredith  has  always  been  able  to  coin  phrase 
that  wants  no  testing  or  touchstone  to  prove  its  metal  of  thought, 
and  nothing  but  a  pair  of  eyes  to  discern  its  grace  and  mastery  of 
form.  And  he  has  also  been  able,  when  he  chose,  to  tell  a  story 
which,  if  not  exactly  spaced  out  in  monosyllables  for  children,  is 
perfectly  legible  to  even  the  running  man  or  woman.  But  this 
"  when  he  chose  "  is  in  his  case  an  exceedingly  large  and  constant 
proviso ;  and  it  may  almost  be  said  that,  for  choice,  he  has 
not  chosen. 

This  not  extremely  uncommon  perverseness  has  well-known 
and  frequently  exemplified  results  in  the  courses  of  the  world. 
A  man  will  very  rarely,  except  at  periods  of  decadence  and  whim, 
conciliate  his  public  in  this  fashion  at  first.  But  if  he  has 
obstinacy,  genius,  means,  and  favourable  opportunity  tor  con- 
tinually putting  his  writing  before  that  public,  it  is  nearly  certain 
that,  in  course  of  time,  what  is  good  in  him  will  make  its  way. 
Unfortunately,  it  is  almost  equally  certain  that  the  success  will 
bring  with  it  a  sort  of  false  popularity — that  young  people,  and 
not  always  young  people  only,  will  think  it  clever  to  admire  what 
has  not  generally  been  admired,  and  will  (even  unconsciously) 
simulate  such  admiration  in  order  to  be  unlike  the  vulgar.  That 
this  has  happened  in  Mr.  Meredith's  case  probably  nobody  would 
deny,  except  some  of  the  very  persons  who  are  affected  by  the 
assertion  of  it.  But  Mr.  Meredith  has  no  need  to  rely  upon 
these  very  rotten  reeds.  Xo  small  part  of  his  present  public  was 


vii  MR.   MEREDITH  345 

brought  to  him  by  the  late  Mr.  Stevenson,  whose  admiration,  and 
even  imitation,  was  as  unmistakable  as  it  was  undisguised  and 
unstinting ;  while  many  living  authorities  say  ditto  to  Mr.  Steven- 
son, and  some,  both  living  and  dead,  had  anticipated  him.  Others, 
however,  may  venture  to  doubt,  not  Mr.  Meredith's  power,  which 
is  unquestionable,  save  in  paradox,  but  the  possibility  of  exactly 
appreciating  his  literary  accomplishment  just  yet,  perhaps  even 
for  some  long  time.  Work  which  is  essentially  bizarre,  even  with 
the  bizarreness  of  genius,  absolutely  demands  time  and  distance 
for  the  attainment  of  a  proper  perspective,  and  this  is  especially 
the  case  when  a  period  of  unjust  neglect  has  been  suddenly 
succeeded  by  a  burst  of  Hosannahs.  The  certain  critical  facts 
are  that  Mr.  Meredith  has  owed  others  very  little,  and  that  others 
have  owed  him  very  much ;  that  his  faults  are,  if  so  common  a 
phrase  can  ever  be  applied  proprie,  the  faults  of  genius ;  and 
that  his  merits  are  still  more  emphatically  not  the  merits  of  the 
chance-comer.  He  is  not  himself  averse  to  metaphors  from  wine, 
and  there  is  perhaps  nothing  that  so  much  resembles  him  as  one 
of  those  puzzling  vintages  which,  even  after  twenty  or  thirty  years, 
refuse  to  make  it  quite  certain  whether  they  will  in  yet  further 
time  mellow  to  a  perfect  triumph,  or  still  remain  hard  and  (as  the 
French  say  of  wine  itself)  "silent,"  though  with  a  constant 
promise  or  suggestion  of  speech. 

His  chief  books  (subsequent  to  The  Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel, 
which  some  think  still  his  best)  are  Evan  Harrington,  1861  ; 
Emilia  in  England  (which  some  have  a  certain  reluctance  to  call 
by  its  altered  title  of  Sandra  Belloni\  1864;  Rhoda  Fleming 
(a  very  notable  book),  1865;  Harry  Richmond,  1871  ;  the  curious 
key-novel  (the  identity  of  its  hero  was  no  secret)  of  Bcauchamp''s 
Career,  1875  ;  77/6'  Egoist  (on  which  some  would  confer  primacy), 
1879;  The  Tragic  Comedians  (again  a  "key"  story),  1881  ;  and 
Diana  of  the  Crossways  (still  "  key "  in  character,  but  fervently 
admired),  1885  ;  with  later  books,  One  of  Our  Conquerors,  Lord 
Ormont  and  his  Aininta,  The  Amazing  Marriage,  and  some  note- 
worthy short  stories 


346  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850 


An  older  man  than  Mr.  Meredith,  like  him  beginning  with 
verse,  and  a  little  later  in  making  mark  with  a  novel,  was  Richard 
Doddridge  Blackmore,  who  was  born  in  1825  and  died  in  1900. 
Born  in  Berkshire,  Mr.  Blackmore  was  educated  at  Tiverton 
School ;  and  its  neighbourhood  (indeed  Devonshire  and  the 
West  Country  generally)  took  a  great  hold  on  him,  forming  the 
subject,  besides  others,  of  his  first  very  popular  story,  Lorna  Doom, 
in  1869,  and  of  his  last  very  good  one,  Perlycross,  in  1894.  He 
had  gone  from  Tiverton  to  Exeter  College,  Oxford,  and  had 
been  called  to  the  Bar ;  but  he  did  not  begin  novel-writing  early, 
and  when  he  did,  he  combined  it  with  the  quaintly  assorted 
occupation  of  growing  fruit  on  a  very  large  scale,  not  merely  for 
pleasure,  but  for  sale  (whether  for  profit  or  not  accounts  differ), 
at  Teddington.  Mr.  Blackmore,  who  was  not  only  "  a  scholar 
and  a  gentleman,"  but  one  of  the  most  homely,  hospitable,  and 
unassuming  of  men,  was  a  master  of  romance,  and  practically 
restored  it  to  popular  favour  with  Lorna  Doone,  a  singularly 
picturesque  and  spirited  tale  of  Exmoor,  and  certain  outlaws  there, 
in  the  late  seventeenth  century.  His  earlier  novels  were  Clara 
Vaughan,  1864;  Cradock  NoiveU,  1866.  His  later  (The  Staid  of 
Sker,  1872  (some  put  this  even  above  Lorna  Doone};  Alice 
Lorraine,  1875;  Cripps  the  Carrier,  1876;  Erema,  1877;  Mary 
Ancrley,  1880;  Chris  towell,  1882;  Sir  Thomas  Upmore,  1884; 
Springhaven,  1887;  Kit  and  Kitty,  1889)  exhibit  almost  without 
exception,  and  with  only  minor  variations  of  degree,  a  charming 
and  prolific  fancy,  much  genuine  humour  of  no  common  kind, 
a  sentiment  never  mawkish,  but  sound  to  the  core,  extraordinary 
descriptive  faculty,  and  all  but  a  supreme  grasp  of  character  of 
the  minor  kind.  Yet  it  would  not  become  the  critical  historian 
to  overlook,  and  it  would  be  impossible  for  him  to  deny,  the 
fact  that  the  disastrously  diffused  character  of  later  nineteenth 
century  genius  and  talent,  when  applied  to  the  novel — the  character 
elsewhere  noticed  in  connection  with  Anthony  Trollope  and 
others — is  to  some  extent  illustrated  in  Mr.  Blackmore.  His 
books  are  always  agreeable,  always  clever,  frequently  delightful  ; 


vii  MRS.   OLIPHANT  347 

but  one  is  constantly  wondering  why  they  are  not  quite 
masterly,  why  we  cannot  be  certain  that  even  Lorna  Doone,  even 
77?!?  Maid  of  Sker,  will  take  place  with  Guy  Manneritig  and 
Esmond. 

This  is  far  more  the  case  with  three  other  novelists — one  a  con- 
temporary of  Mr.  Meredith,  one  a  little  younger,  one  younger  still  by 
another  decade,  who  "amused  the  town  " — and  the  country — for  the 
greater  part  of  the  last  half  of  the  century.  Margaret  Oliphant,  who 
was  born  in  1828,  was  indeed  one  of  the  most  industrious  writers 
of  the  entire  period,  and  not  only  produced  novels  by  scores, 
but  essayed  history  (literary  and  political),  descriptive  writing, 
criticism,  biography,  practically  everything.  Unluckily,  a  pleasant 
pen  and  a  pleasant  wit,  perhaps  sharpened  sometimes  (as  her 
almost  appallingly  rapid  production  is  said  to  have  been  hurried) 
by  domestic  reasons,  are  almost  the  sole  merits  of  her  miscel- 
laneous work.  With  her  novels,  of  which  from  their  enormous 
number  we  cannot  attempt  a  list  here,  it  was  different.  The 
Chronicles  of  Carlingford  (1862-66)  were  of  quite  extraordinary 
promise  in  their  kind — that  of  domestic  middle-class  story,  only 
slightly  satirical  in  fashion,  and  mothering  itself  back,  through 
George  Eliot  and  Mrs.  Gaskell,  on  Miss  Austen.  Some  not  in- 
competent judges  were  disposed  to  put  this  promise  at  least  on  a 
level  with  George  Eliot's  own.  But  this  kind  of  writing,  if  any 
other,  requires  the  most  careful  and  delicate  treatment ;  it  cannot 
be  done  hurriedly,  and  it  cannot  be  done  often  or  in  great  volume. 
Mrs.  Oliphant  never  quite  lost  the  touch  to  the  last ;  but  the  wild 
hurry  of  her  composition — two,  three,  four,  even  five  books  in  a 
year,  besides  minor  things — made  it  impossible  for  these  touches 
not  to  be  lost  in  inferior  work.  The  second  volumes  of  her  three- 
volume  novels  became  a  by-word  with  critics  for  their  intrepid 
"padding,"  and  her  work  out  of  fiction  was  constantly  marred  by 
insufficient  study.  In  this  last  she  never  did  anything  better  than 
The  House  of  Blackwood,  a  chronicle  which  she  left  unfinished 
at  her  death,  to  be  completed  by  another  hand ;  and  some  quite 
late  novels  (she  had  latterly  tried  a  supernatural  style,  unequal, 


348  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

but  at  best  good)  showed  also  that  there  was  no  positive  irrepar- 
able degeneration  of  her  talent.  But  no  human  being,  not  Shake- 
speare or  Scott,  could  have  made  the  things  that  she  wrote  good 
in  the  time  in  which  she  wrote  them. 

This  excuse,  if  excuse  it  be,  told  more  in  the  case  of  James 
Payn  (1830-98)  than  in  that  of  William  Black,  who  was  born  eleven 
years  later,  but  died  in  the  same  year  as  his  friend  and  senior.  Mr. 
Payn  had  the  unusual  experience  of  successive  education  at  Eton, 
Woolwich,  and  Cambridge,  with  the  still  more  unusual  result  of 
dislike  for  all  three;  but  this  only  argued  eccentricity,  not  ill  blood. 
in  his  disposition,  for  he  was  one  of  the  most  amiable  as  well  as 
the  most  amusing  of  men.  He  made  his  way  into  literature  by 
writing  for  and  editing  Chambers 's  Journal,  and  later  edited  the 
Cornhill  Magazine ;  but  after  1864,  when  his  novel  of  Lost  Sir 
Massingberd  became  extremely  popular,  he  devoted  the  remaining 
half  of  his  life  partly  to  journalism,  but  for  the  most  part  to 
the  same  sort  of  novel-writing-against-time  which  has  just  been 
noticed.  He  was  sometimes  melodramatic,  sometimes  comical, 
and  in  this  latter  mood  often  very  successful,  though  always  (as 
he  knew  perfectly  well)  producing  work  of  a  somewhat  flimsy 
character,  better  to  read  once  than  twice,  and  certainly  not 
tempting  to  read  often.  But  there  was  no  puzzle  of  any  sort 
about  Mr.  Payn,  as  there  was  no  pretension ;  he  was  simply  a 
very  clever  man  who,  at  a  time  when  novel-writing  was  popular, 
had  drifted  into  it  as  into  any  other  kind  of  honest  journey-work. 

Mr.  Black's  career  is  not  quite  such  plain  sailing  to  the  critic. 
He,  too,  began  with  journalism,  but  soon  turned  to  novel-writing, 
made  a  great  success  with  it,  and  never  abandoned  it  wholly,  though 
it  was  understood  that  in  his  latter  years  he  wrote  rather  for 
pleasure  and  from  habit  than  from  necessity.  Yet  here  the  absence 
of  pressure  actually  coincided  with  a  distinct  and  almost  unaccount- 
able drop  in  merit.  His  first  novels  that  attracted  attention,  In 
Silk  Attire  (1869),  and  Kilmeny  (1870),  were  much  above  the 
average.  A  Daughter  of  Ileth  (1871)  had  excellent  painting  of 
manners,  and  pathos  of  an  undeniable  and  not  vulgar  kind ;  The 


vii  WILLIAM  BLACK — MISS  YONGE  349 

Strange  Adventures  of  a  Phaeton  and  A  Princess  of  Thule  were 
each  of  them  novel  and  attractive  in  different  ways ;  and  as  late 
as  the  melodrama  of  Macleod  of  Dare  in  1878  it  was  possible  to 
believe  that  Mr.  Black  was  going  to  do  better  things  than  any 
that  he  had  done.  But  he  did  not  do  them  ;  on  the  contrary, 
he  fell  back  on  iteration  of  the  Highland  scenery  and  talk  that 
had  pleased  at  first,  on  character-mannerisms  of  a  "  Dickensish  " 
kind,  and  on  experiments  which  rarely  succeeded  even  to  a 
moderate  extent.  Yet  whether  this  was  due  to  simple  laziness, 
or  to  a  real  failure  of  power,  no  critic  can  say. 

Within  three  months  from  the  close  of  the  century,  on  23rd 
March  1901,  died  perhaps  the  foremost  representative  of  those 
groups  of  special  novelists  who  are  more  than  once  alluded  to 
elsewhere.  Miss  Charlotte  Yonge,  who  had  been  born  in  August 
1823  near  Winchester,  resided  in  the  same  neighbourhood  for  the 
whole  of  her  admirable  life.  Her  specialty,  though  she  was  by  no 
means  narrowly  confined  to  it,  was  what  is  popularly  called  "  the 
High  Church  novel" — a  kind  largely  practised  between  1830  and 
1860,  and  beyond  all  doubt  influential  in  achieving  the  triumph 
of  the  party  over  what  seemed  at  times  very  adverse  circumstances. 
The  practitioners  of  it  in  these  years  were  numerous,  and  their 
work  ranged  from  the  religious  allegory  of  Bishop  Wilberforce 
and  others  (especially  the  Rev.  W.  Adams),  and  the  extremely 
didactic  story,  to  less  restricted  forms.  Towards  these  last  Miss 
Yonge  worked  her  way,  somewhat  slowly,  but  very  surely.  Her 
earliest  work  was  graceful  and  meritorious ;  but  it  was  not  till 
after  the  middle  of  the  century  that  she  began  to  show  her  power 
over  story  and  character.  Her  most  famous  book,  The  Heir  of 
Redclyffe  (1853),  is  still  a  little  marred  by  excessive  purpose,  as 
well  as  by  sentimentalism  and  the  cheap  pathos  of  early  death  and 
youthful  widowhood ;  but  it  is  already  a  most  remarkable  book, 
and  exercised  a  very  great  influence.  It  was  followed  by  Hearts- 
case,  perhaps  the  best  of  all  for  character-drawing,  in  1854  ;  by 
The  Daisy  Chain  (which  rivalled  if  it  did  not  exceed  the  Heir  of 
Redclyffe  in  popularity),  in  1856;  and  by  a  less  popular  book, 


350  THE  NOVEL  SINCE   1850 


containing  some  quite  excellent  dialogue  and  character-study, 
Dynevor  Terrace,  in  1857.  These  books  eminently,  and  nearly 
all  the  rest  of  her  immense  work  more  or  less,  show  great  com- 
mand of  sheer  story-telling  power,  extreme  accuracy  and  fertility  in 
observing  and  reproducing  ordinary  character,  excellent  reading,  a 
real  sense  of  humour,  all  infused  and  shot  with  the  intensest  but 
least  "goody-goody"  religious  feeling,  a  refined  and  not  in  the 
least  pharisaical  morality,  and  an  utter  freedom  from  either  ascetic 
or  Puritan  dislike  of  manly  sport  and  wholesome  amusement. 
Miss  Yonge's  normal  novel,  in  short,  is  an  adaptation,  with  a 
certain  theological  colour,  of  that  novel  of  ordinary  life  which,  as 
we  have  seen,  derived  from  Miss  Austen,  but  did  not  take 
exact  form  till  the  middle  of  the  century.  That  she  suffers, 
like  so  many  Victorian  novelists,  from  over-production  cannot 
be  denied.  Perhaps  also  in  her  later  books  (for  Miss  Yonge 
continued  to  write  till  almost  the  close  of  her  long  life)  there  may 
be  seen  the  operation  of  something  which  is  also  noticeable  in 
the  later  books  of  Thackeray  and  Trollope,  something  resulting 
from  the  fact  that  the  author,  with  not  quite  perfect  success,  is 
endeavouring  to  adapt  himself  or  herself  to  those  most  elusive 
changes  of  familiar  manners  and  language,  the  necessity  of  aping 
which  makes  this  kind  of  novel  so  difficult.  But  on  the  whole  her 
work  was  a  really  great  work — great  in  purely  literary  characteristics 
as  well  as  in  others,  and  giving  testimony  that  morality  in  novels 
does  not  of  necessity  mean  mawkishness,  and  that  the  decorous 
need  be  neither  the  dull  nor  the  dry.  It  is  no  exaggeration 
to  say  that  it  had  hardly  less  share  than  Thackeray's  in  some 
ways,  and  Kingsley's  in  others  (assisted  of  course  by  the  influence 
of  Ruskin  and  Carlyle,  of  Tennyson  and  Browning,  in  older  and 
higher  styles),  in  fashioning,  for  young  men  and  women  of  the 
mid -Victorian  era,  a  standard  of  gentle  life  which  posterity, 
looking  at  it  in  "the  firm  perspective  of  the  past,"  will  not  perhaps 
place  so  very  far  below  that  of  Greek  kaloka^uthia,  or  that  of 
Spenserian  knightliness  and  ladyhood. 

It  should  be  added  that,  besides  her  more  or  less  regular  novels. 


vii  WILKIE  COLLINS— H.   KINGSLEY  351 

Miss  Yonge  wrote  a  large  number  of  stories  more  definitely  for 
children,  the  best  of  which  is  perhaps  the  charming  Lances  of 
Lynwood;  that  she  was  a  sound  and  untiring  historical  student, 
showing  her  knowledge  in  many  books  on  that  subject,  especially 
Cameos  from  English  History  ;  and  that  for  very  many  years  she 
was  editor  of  The  Monthly  Packet. 

The  chief  novelist  of  what  is  rather  loosely  called  the  School 
of  Dickens  was  Wilkie  Collins,  son  of  the  painter  of  that  name, 
who  was  born  in  London  on  8th  January  1824,  and  died  in  1889. 
His  greatest  popularity  was  in  the  decade  between  1857  and 
1866,  when  The  Dead  Secret,  The  Woman  in  White,  No  Name, 
and  Armadale,  especially  the  second,  had  an  immense  vogue. 
Perhaps  The  Moonstone,  which  is  later,  is  also  better  than  any  of 
these.  The  strictly  literary  merit  of  none  could  be  put  high,  and 
the  method,  that  of  forwarding  the  result  by  a  complicated  inter- 
twist of  letters  and  narratives,  though  it  took  the  public  fancy  for 
a  time,  was  clumsy ;  while  the  author  followed  his  master  in  more 
than  one  aberration  of  taste  and  sentiment.  His  brother  Charles 
Collins,  who  had  a  much  shorter  life,  had  a  much  more  delicate 
style  and  fancy ;  and  the  Cruise  upon  Wheels,  a  record  of  an 
actual  tour  slightly  embellished  and  thrown  into  fictitious  form, 
is  one  of  the  books  which  have,  and  are  not,  unless  they  drop 
entirely  out  of  sight,  likely  to  lose,  a  firm  following  of  friends,  few 
perhaps,  but  faithful.  Mortimer  Collins,  a  contemporary,  but  no 
relation  of  these,  whose  poems  have  already  been  mentioned,  was 
born  in  1827  and  died  in  1876,  the  last  twenty  years  of  his  life 
having  been  occupied  by  various  and  voluminous  literary  work. 
He  was  one  of  the  last  of  the  so-called  Bohemian  school  in  letters 
and  journalism,  something  of  a  scholar,  a  fertile  novelist,  and  a 
versatile  journalist  in  most  of  the  kinds  which  make  up  modern 
journalism. 

Henry  Kingsley,  younger  brother  of  Charles,  was  himself  a  pro- 
lific and  vigorous  novelist ;  and  though  a  recent  attempt  to  put  him 
above  his  brother  cannot  possibly  be  allowed  by  sound  criticism, 
he  had  perhaps  a  more  various  command  of  fiction,  certainly  a 


352  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 

truer  humour,  and  if  a  less  passionate,  perhaps  a  more  thoroughly 
healthy  literary  temperament.  But  his  life  was  not  long,  and  he 
was  unfortunately  compelled  during  most  of  it  to  write  for  a  living. 
Born  in  1830,  he  was  educated  at  King's  College,  London,  and 
Worcester  College,  Oxford,  on  leaving  which  latter  he  went  to 
Australia  and  lived  there  for  five  years.  Returning  in  1859,  he 
wrote  the  admirable  Australian  story  of  Geoffrey  Ila mlyn,  which,  with 
Ravenshoe  two  years  later,  contains  most  of  his  work  that  can  be 
called  really  first  rate.  He  returned  to  Australia  for  his  subject 
in  The  Hillyars  and  the  Burtons,  and  wrote  several  other  novels 
before  his  death  in  1876,  having  been  during  part  of  the  time  a 
newspaper  editor,  a  newspaper  correspondent,  and  a  journalist 
generally.  The  absence  of  composition,  which  Flaubert  deplored 
in  English  novels  generally,  shows  at  its  height  in  Henry  Kingsley, 
whose  Ravenshoe,  for  instance,  has  scarcely  any  plot  at  all,  and 
certainly  owes  nothing  to  what  it  has,  while  he  was  a  rapid  and 
careless  writer.  But  he  had,  in  a  somewhat  less  elaborate  form, 
all  his  brother's  talents  for  description  of  scene  and  action,  and 
his  characters,  if  more  in  the  way  of  ordinary  life,  are  also  truer 
to  that  life.  Also  he  is  particularly  to  be  commended  for  having, 
without  the  slightest  strait -lacedness,  and  indeed  with  a  good 
deal  of  positive  Bohemianism,  exhibited  the  nineteenth  century 
English  notion  of  what  constitutes  a  gentleman  perhaps  better 
than  any  one  else.  "  There  are  some  things  a  fellow  cant  do" — the 
chance  utterance  of  his  not  ungenerous  scamp  Lord  Welter — is  a 
memorable  sentence,  whereon  a  great  sermon  might  be  preached. 
A  little  older  than  Henry  Kingsley  (he  died  in  the  same  year), 
much  more  popular  for  a  time,  and  the  exerter  of  an  influence 
which  has  not  ceased  yet,  and  has  been  on  the  whole  distinctly 
undervalued,  was  George  Alfred  Lawrence,  who  was  educated  at 
Rugby  and  Balliol,  was  called  to  the  Bar,  but  was  generally  known 
in  his  own  time  as  Major  Lawrence  from  a  militia  commission 
which  he  held.  He  also  fought  in,  or  at  least  was  present  during 
the  war  of  independence  of  the  Southern  States  of  America. 
Lawrence,  who  was  born  in  1827,  published  in  his  thirtieth  year 


vii  LAWRENCE— MRS.  GASKELL  353 

a  novel,  Guy  Livingstone,  which  was  very  popular,  and  much 
denounced  as  the  gospel  of  "  muscular  blackguardism  " — a  parody 
on  the  phrase  "muscular  Christianity,"  which  had  been  applied  to 
and  not  unwelcomed  by  Charles  Kingsley.  The  book  exhibited 
a  very  curious  blend  of  divers  of  the  motives  and  interests  which 
have  been  specified  as  actuating  the  novel  about  this  time. 
Lawrence,  who  was  really  a  scholar,  felt  to  the  full  the  Prae-Raphaelite 
influence  in  art,  though  by  no  means  in  religion,  and  wrote  in  a 
style  which  is  a  sort  of  transition  between  the  excessive  floridness 
of  the  first  Lord  Lytton  and  the  later  Corinthianism  of  Mr. 
Symonds.  But  he  retained  also  from  his  prototype,  and  new 
modelled,  the  tendency  to  take  "society  "and  the  manners,  especially 
the  amatory  manners,  of  society  very  much  as  his  province.  And 
thus  he  rather  shocked  the  moralists,  not  only  in  Guy  Livingstone 
itself,  but  in  its  successors  Sword  and  Gown,  Barren  Honour, 
Sans  Merc!,  etc.  That  Lawrence's  total  ideal,  both  in  style  and 
sentiment,  was  artificial,  false,  and  flawed,  may  be  admitted.  But 
he  has  to  a  great  extent  been  made  to  bear  the  blame  of  exaggera- 
tions of  his  own  scheme  by  others ;  and  he  was  really  a  novelist 
and  a  writer  of  great  talent,  which  somehow  came  short,  but  not 
so  very  far  short,  of  genius. 

Mrs.  Gaskell  was  older  than  most  of  those  hitherto  mentioned 
in  this  chapter,  having  been  born  in  1810;  but  she  did  not  begin 
to  write  very  early.  Mary  Barton,  her  first  and  nearly  her  best 
book,  appeared  in  1848,  and  its  vivid  picture  of  Manchester  life, 
assisted  by  its  great  pathos,  naturally  attracted  attention  at  that 
particular  time.  Cranford  (1853),  in  a  very  different  style,  some- 
thing like  a  blend  of  Miss  Mitford  and  Miss  Austen,  has  been  the 
most  permanently  popular  of  her  works.  Ruth,  of  the  same  year, 
shocked  precisians  (which  it  need  not  have  done),  but  is  of  much 
less  literary  value  than  Mary  Barton  or  Cranford.  Mrs.  Gaskell, 
\vho  was  the  biographer  of  Charlotte  Bronte,  produced  novels 
regularly  till  her  death  in  1865,  and  never  wrote  anything  bad, 
though  it  may  be  doubted  whether  anything  but  Cranford  will 
retain  permanent  rank. 


354  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 


The  year  1857,  which  saw  Guy  Livingstone,  saw  a  book  as 
different  as  possible  in  ideal,  but  also  one  of  no  common  merit,  in 
John  Halifax,  Gentleman.  The  author  of  this  was  Dinah  Maria 
Mulock,  who  afterwards  became  Mrs.  Craik.  She  was  born  at 
Stoke-upon-Trent  in  1826,  and  had  written  for  nearly  ten  years 
wheny"f/$tt  Halifax  appeared.  She  died  in  1888,  having  written 
a  very  great  deal  both  in  prose  and  verse  ;  the  former  part  including 
many  novels,  of  which  the  best  perhaps  is  A  Life  for  a  Life.  Mrs. 
Craik  was  an  example  of  the  influence,  so  often  noticed  and  to  be 
noticed  in  the  latter  part  of  our  period,  of  the  great  demand  for 
books  on  writers  of  any  popularity.  Her  work  was  never  bad  . 
but  it  was  to  a  very  great  extent  work  which  was,  as  the  French 
say,  the  "small  change"  for  what  would  probably  in  other  circum- 
stances have  been  a  very  much  smaller  quantity  of  much  better 
work.  How  this  state  of  things — which  has  been  brought  about 
on  the  one  hand  by  the  printing-press,  newspapers,  and  the  spread 
of  education,  on  the  other  by  the  disuse  of  sinecures,  patronage, 
pensions,  and  easy  living  generally  —  is  to  be  prevented  from 
affecting  literature  very  disastrously  is  not  clear. 

What  may  be  called  the  specialist  novel  can  for  many  reasons 
be  but  slightly  treated  here.  Religious  stories,  or  stories  with  a 
pronounced  religious  tendency,  have  been  innumerable,  though 
they  have  seldom  reached  the  excellence  of  the  best  of  those 
which  we  owe  to  Miss  Charlotte  Yonge.  In  a  somewhat  different 
division,  the  "sporting"  novelists,  the  chief,  perhaps,  were  Robert 
Surtees,  the  author  of  the  facetious  scries  of  which  "  Mr.  Jorrocks"  is 
the  central  and  best  figure,  and  Major  Whyte-Melville.  The  former, 
about  the  middle  of  the  century,  carried  out  with  much  knowledge, 
not  inconsiderable  wit,  and  the  advantage  of  admirable  illustrations 
from  the  pencil  of  John  Leech,  something  like  the  original  idea  of 
Pickwick  as  a  sporting  romance,  and  there  is  a  strong  following 
of  Dickens  in  him.  Major  Whyte  -  Melville,  born  near  St. 
Andrews  in  1821,  and  heir  to  property  there,  was  educated  at 
Kton,  served  for  some  years  in  the  (iuarcls  and  with  the  Turkish 
Contingent  in  the  Crimean  War,  and  was  killed  in  the  hunting- 


MINOR  NOVELISTS  355 


field  in  1878.  He  touched  various  styles,  chiefly  those  of  Lever 
and  Bulwer,  while  he  had  a  sort  of  contact  with  George  Lawrence. 
He  was  never  happier  than  in  depicting  his  favourite  pastime, 
which  figures  in  most  of  his  novels  and  inspired  him  with  some 
capital  verse.  But  in  Holmby  House,  Sarchedon,  the  Gladiators. 
etc.,  he  tried  the  historical  style  also. 

Nor  must  the  brief  life,  embittered  by  physical  suffering,  but 
productive  of  not  a  little  very  cheerful  work,  of  Francis  Edward 
Smedley,  a  relation  of  the  poetess  mentioned  in  the  last  chapter, 
be  forgotten.  He,  born  in  1818,  went  to  Cambridge,  and  then 
became  a  novelist  and  journalist,  dying  in  1864.  His  best  work 
belongs  to  exactly  the  period  with  which  this  chapter  begins,  the 
early  fifties,  and  had  the  advantage,  like  other  novels  of  the  time,  of 
illustration  by  "  Phiz."  The  three  chief  books  are  Frank  Fairldgh 
(1850),  Lewis  Arundel  (1852),  and  Harry  Coverdatis  Courtship 
(1854).  With  a  touch  of  Bulwerian  romance,  something  of  the  sport- 
ing novel,  and  a  good  deal  of  the  adventure  story,  Smedley  united 
plenty  of  pleasant  humour  and  occasionally  not  a  little  real  wit. 

Two  slightly  nondescript  writers  may  find  their  niche  here,  as 
their  best  work  at  least  wears  the  guise  of  prose  fiction.  Thomas 
Hughes  (1823-96),  a  very  well-known  and  well-doing  man  of  his 
own  day,  belongs  to  literature  in  main  virtue  of  his  famous 
embodiment  of  the  life  of  a  Rugby  boy  during  Arnold's  time, 
Tom  Brown's  Schooldays  (1856),  a  book  which  has  gone  through 
editions  innumerable,  and,  imitated  almost  as  often,  has  invariably 
shown  its  superiority  to  all  imitations.  The  other  works  of  Mr. 
Hughes  (who  was  a  great  friend  of  Kingsley  and  Maurice,  and 
an  ardent  "muscular  Christian  ")  are  of  less  importance,  though 
The  Scouring  of  the  White  Horse  (1858)  should  have  been  more 
popular  than  it  was.  Tom  Brown  at  Oxford  (1861)  did  not  escape 
either  the  curse  of  sequels,  or  that  which  seems  to  hang  on  all  books 
(except  the  admirable  extravaganza  of  Verdant  Green,  composed  by 
the  Rev.  C.  Bradley,  not  an  Oxford  man  at  all,  who  called  himself 
Cuthbert  Bede,  and  wrote  nothing  else  of  equal  value)  which  make 
university  life  their  main  subject,  instead  of  treating  it  episodically. 


356  TIIK  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP. 


The  other,  Mr.  Charles  Lutwidge  Dodgson  (1833-98),  called 
himself  in  literature  "  Lewis  Carroll,"  and  resisted  all  attempts  to 
violate  this  incognito  with  a  rigidity  rare  and  refreshing  in  the 
nineteenth  century.  A  senior  student  of  Christ  Church,  he  was 
known  in  Oxford  as  a  man  of  curious  appearance  and  temper, 
a  subtle  mathematician  in  the  outer  isles  and  less-explored  realms 
of  mathematics,  and  a  most  ingenious  and  fanciful  author  of 
university  "skits."  In  1865  he  published  one  of  the  most  unique 
books  of  the  century,  Alice's  Adventures  in  Wonderland,  ostensibly 
a  children's  book,  and  a  medley  of  verse  and  prose,  fairy  tale  and 
extravaganza  ;  really  as  full  of  wit  and  sense  as  of  fancy  and 
imagination,  and  inspiring  (far  more  than  it  was  helped  by)  the 
admirable  accompanying  illustrations  by  Mr.  (not  then  Sir  John) 
Tenniel.  For  the  rest  of  his  life  Mr.  Dodgson  continued  to 
alternate  mathematics  with  this  same  kind  of  phantasmagoria, 
the  two  opposites  not  seldom  running  into  each  other.  The  sequel 
of  the  Adventures,  Through  the  Looking  Glass,  which  appeared 
in  1871,  for  once  was  every  whit  as  good  as  its  predecessor. 
Indeed,  to  those  who  have  become  intimate  with  them — and 
except  in  the  case  of  very  poor  and  unhappy  or  very  exceptionally 
constituted  brains,  the  first  acquaintance  makes  intimacy  inevit- 
able--the  two  are  really  one.  The  vegetables  of  telescoping 
virtue  and  the  incarnate  court-cards,  the  mock  turtle  and  the 
March  hare  ;  Alice  herself  and  the  black  kitten,  Tweedledum  and 
Tweedledee  ;  the  teapot  and  the  mysterious  shop,  and  the  actual 
looking-glass,  have  arranged  themselves  as  the  places  and  furniture 
and  characters  of  a  single  and  legitimate  drama — all  real  with 
literary  reality,  and — the  actors  at  least — instinct  with  literary 
life.  On  no  modern  book  would  it  be  so  interesting  to  the 
student  of  criticism  to  have  the  sentiments  of  a  classical,  and  of 
an  average  Renaissance,  critic.  For  the  Aristophanic  quality, 
which  repelled  or  puzzled  most  of  the  ancients,  has  here  been 
reinforced  by  a  further  dose  of  a  different  humour  ;  and  that 
worship  of  "verisimilitude''  which  made  some  Renaissance 
critics  doubt  whether  the  "  imitator ''  would  not  almost  do  better 


vii  "LEWIS  CARROL"  357 

to  confine  himself  to  subjects  historically  true,  is  flouted  in  the 
most  audacious  fashion.  And  yet,  as  has  been  said,  verisimilitude 
of  a  kind  is  triumphantly  reached  :  and  the  Duchess  may  take 
her  place  serenely  with  Dejanira  and  with  Dido.  Whether  equal 
praise  is  due  to  Mr.  Dodgson's  later  attempts,  The  Hunting  of 
the  Snark  (wholly  in  verse,  in  which  medium  he  had  produced 
other  volumes),  A  Tangled  Tale,  Sylvie  and  Bruno,  etc.,  may  be 
doubted.  The  Snark,  though  it  supplied  some  quotations  which 
have  already  entered  the  stock  volume  of  such  things,  and  had 
a  great  deal  of  the  topsy-turvy  humour  of  Alice,  was  not  generally 
liked  as  a  whole ;  the  others  still  less.  But  it  was  in  the  nature 
of  the  case  that  no  large  amount  of  such  matter  could  be  evenly 
good,  and  the  two  Alice  volumes  hold,  and  are  ever  likely  to 
hold,  their  own.  They  have  actually — a  rare  success  for  English 
humour — been  admired,  translated,  and  imitated  on  the  Continent ; 
and  at  home  they  have  hit  the  taste  of  practically  all  ages,  sorts, 
and  conditions,  except  that  of  a  class  whose  suffrages  the  author 
was  most  assuredly  not  anxious  to  secure. 

It  will  have  been  observed  that  more  than  one  of  the  more 
distinguished  novelists  of  this  time  attempted,  and  that  at  least 
one  of  them  achieved,  the  historical  novel;  nor  was  it  at  all  likely 
that  a  kind  so  attractive  in  itself,  illustrated  by  such  remarkable 
genius,  and  discovered  at  last  after  many  centuries  of  futile 
endeavour,  should  immediately  or  entirely  lose  its  popularity. 
Yet  it  is  certain  that  for  about  a  quarter  of  a  century,  from  1845 
to  1870,  not  merely  the  historical  novel,  but  the  romance  generally, 
did  lose  general  practice  and  general  attention,  while,  though 
about  the  latter  date  at  least  one  novel  of  brilliant  quality,  Mr. 
Blackmore's  Lorna  Doom,  vindicated  romance,  and  historical 
romance,  it  was  still  something  of  an  exception.  Those  who  are 
old  enough,  and  who  paid  sufficient  attention  to  contemporary 
criticism,  will  remember  that  for  many  years  the  advent  of  a  his- 
torical novel  was  greeted  in  reviews  with  a  note  not  exactly  of 
contempt,  but  of  the  sort  of  surprise  with  which  men  greet  some- 
thing out  of  the  way  and  old  fashioned. 


358  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850  CHAP 

This  was  the  inevitable  result  of  that  popularity  of  the  domestic 
and  usual  novel  which  this  chapter  has  hitherto  described,  and  it 
was  as  natural  and  as  inevitable  that  the  domestic  and  usual  novel 
should  in  its  turn  undergo  the  same  law.  Not  that  this,  again, 
was  summarily,  much  less  finally,  displaced;  on  the  contrary,  the 
enormous  and  ever-increasing  demand  for  fiction — which  the 
establishment  of  public  free  libraries,  and  the  custom  of  printing 
in  cheaper  form  for  sale,  has  encouraged  pari  passu  with  the 
apparent  discouragement  given  to  it  by  the  fall  of  circulating 
libraries  from  the  absolutely  paramount  place  which  they  occupied 
not  long  ago — maintained  the  call  for  this  as  for  other  kinds  of 
story.  But  partly  mere  love  of  change,  partly  the  observations 
of  those  critics  who  were  not  content  to  follow  the  fashion  merely, 
and  partly  also  the  familiar  but  inexplicable  rise  at  the  same 
time  of  divers  persons  whose  talent  inclined  in  a  new  direction, 
brought  in,  about  1880  or  later,  a  demand  for  romance,  for  his- 
torical romance,  and  for  the  short  story — three  things  against  which 
the  taste  of  the  circulating-library  reader  during  the  generation 
then  expiring  had  distinctly  set  itself.  The  greater  part  of  the 
results  of  this  change  falls  out  of  our  subject;  but  one  remarkable 
name,  perhaps  the  most  remarkable  of  all,  is  given  to  us  by  the 
Fates. 

For  one  of  the  pillars  of  this  new  building  of  romance  was 
only  too  soon  removed.  Robert  Louis  Ealfour  Stevenson  (more 
commonly  known  to  the  public  by  the  first  two,  and  to  his  friends 
by  the  second  of  his  Christian  names)  belonged  to  the  famous 
family  of  lighthouse  architects  who  so  long  carried  on  the  tradi- 
tions of  Smeaton  in  that  department  of  engineering  ;  and  he  was 
to  have  been  an  engineer  himself.  But  he  was  incurably  literary  ; 
and  after  school  and  college  at  Edinburgh,  was  called  to  the  Bar, 
with  no  more  practical  results  in  that  profession  than  in  the  other. 
Born  on  i3th  November  1850,  he  was  not  extremely  precocious 
in  publication  ;  and  it  was  not  till  nearly  the  end  of  the  seventies 
that  his  essays  in  the  Corn/till  Ma^a^ine  and  his  stories  in  a 
periodical  called  London,  short  lived  and  not  widely  circulated,  but 


vii  STEVENSON  359 

noteworthy  in  its  way,  attracted  attention.  He  followed  them  up 
with  two  volumes  of  somewhat  Sternian  travel,  An  Inland  Voyage 
(1878)  and  Travels  with  a  Donkey  in  the  Cevennes  (1879);  next 
collecting  his  Cornhill  Essays  in  two  other  volumes,'  Virginibus 
Puerisque  ( 1 88 1 )  and  Familiar  Studies  of  Men  and  Books  (1882),  and 
his  London  stories  in  The  New  Arabian  Nights  (1882).  But  he  did 
not  get  hold  of  the  public  till  a  year  later  than  the  latest  of  these 
dates,  with  his  famous  Treasure  Island,  the  best  boys'  story  since 
Marryat,  and  one  of  a  literary  excellence  to  which  Marryat  could 
make  no  pretensions.  The  vein  of  romance  which  he  then  struck, 
and  the  older  and  more  fanciful  one  of  the  New  Arabian  Nights, 
were  followed  up  alternately  or  together  in  an  almost  annual 
succession  of  books — Prince  Otto  (1885),  The  Strange  Case  of  Dr 
fekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde  (1886),  Kidnapped  (i%%6),  The  Black  Arrow 
(a  wonderfully  good,  though  not  very  generally  popular,  York-and- 
Lancaster  story)  (1888),  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  (1889),  the 
exquisite  Catriona  (1893).  It  also  pleased  him  to  write,  in  col- 
laboration with  others,  The  Dynamiter,  The  Wrecker,  The  Ebb 
Tide,  etc.,  where  the  tracing  of  the  several  shares  is  not  unamusing. 
Stevenson  also  attempted  poetry,  and  his  Child's  Garden  of  Verse 
(1885)  has  very  warm  admirers,  who  are  often  more  doubtful  about 
Underwoods  (1887)  and  Ballads  (1891).  The  list  of  his  work  is 
not  exhausted,  and  one  of  the  latest  additions  to  it  was  A  Footnote 
to  History  (1892),  containing  an  account  of  the  intestine  troubles 
of  the  island  of  Samoa,  where  Mr.  Stevenson,  long  a  victim  to 
lung  disease,  latterly  fixed  his  abode,  and  where  he  died  suddenly 
in  the  winter  of  1894. 

As  has  been  the  case  with  most  of  the  distinguished  writers 
of  recent  years,  Mr.  Stevenson  has  been  praised  by  some  of  his 
contemporaries  and  juniors  with  an  uncritical  fervour  which  has 
naturally  provoked  depreciation  from  others  ;  and  the  charm  of 
his  personality  was  so  great  that  it  is  extremely  difficult  for  any 
one  who  knew  him  to  hold  the  scales  quite  even.  As  the  most 
brilliant  and  interesting  by  far,  however,  of  those  English  writers 
whose  life  was  comprised  in  the  last  half  of  the  century  he 


360  THE  NOVEL  SINCE  1850 


absolutely  demands  critical  treatment  here,  and  it  so  happens  that 
his  method  and  results  were  extremely  typical  of  the  literary  move- 
ment and  character  of  our  time.  He  has  left  somewhat  minute 
accounts  of  his  own  apprenticeship,  but  they  are  almost  unneces- 
sary :  no  critic  of  the  slightest  competence  could  fail  to  divine  the 
facts.  Adopting  to  the  full,  and  something  more  than  the  full,  the 
modern  doctrine  of  the  all-importance  of  art,  of  manner,  of  style 
in  literature,  Mr.  Stevenson  early  made  the  most  elaborate  studies 
in  imitative  composition.  There  is  no  doubt  that  he  at  last 
succeeded  in  acquiring  a  style  which  was  quite  his  own  ;  but  it 
was  complained,  and  with  justice,  that  even  to  the  last  lie  never 
attained  complete  ease  in  this  style ;  that  its  mannerism  was  not 
only  excessive,  but  bore,  as  even  excessive  mannerism  by  no  means 
always  does,  the  marks  of  distinct  and  obvious  effort.  This  was 
perhaps  most  noticeable  in  his  essays,  which  were  further  marred 
by  the  fact  that  much  of  them  was  occupied  by  criticism,  for 
which,  though  his  taste  was  original  and  delicate,  Stevenson's 
knowledge  was  not  quite  solid  enough,  and  his  range  of  sympathies 
a  little  deficient  in  width.  In  his  stories,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
devil's  advocate  detected  certain  weak  points,  the  chief  of  them 
being  an  incapacity  to  finish,  and  either  a  distaste  or  an  incapacity 
for  introducing  women.  This  last  charge  was  finally  refuted  by 
Catriona,  not  merely  in  the  heroine,  but  in  the  much  more  charming 
and  lifelike  figure  of  Barbara  Grant  ;  but  the  other  was  something 
of  a  true  bill  to  the  last.  It  was  Stevenson's  weakness  (as  by  the 
way  it  also  was  Scott's)  to  huddle  up  his  stories  rather  than  to 
wind  them  off  to  an  orderly  conclusion. 

But  against  this  allowance — a  just  but  an  ample  one — for  defects, 
must  be  set  to  Stevenson's  credit  such  a  combination  of  literary 
and  story-telling  charm  as  perhaps  no  writer  except  Merimee  has 
ever  equalled  ;  while,  if  the  literary  side  of  him  had  not  the  golden 
perfection,  the  accomplished  ease  of  the  Frenchman,  his  romance 
has  a  more  genial,  a  fresher,  a  more  natural  quality.  Generally,  as 
in  the  famous  examples  of  Scott,  of  Dumas,  and  of  Balzac,  the 
great  story  tellers  have  been  a  little  deficient  in  mere  style  ;  the 


vii  STEVENSON  361 

fault  in  Stevenson,  if  it  could  be  called  a  fault,  was  that  the  style 
was  in  excess.  But  this  only  set  off  and  enhanced,  it  did  not 
account  for,  the  magic  of  his  scene  and  character,  from  John 
Silver  to  Barbara  Grant,  from  "  The  Suicide  Club  "  to  the  escapes 
of  Alan  Breck.  Very  early,  when  most  of  his  critical  friends  were 
urging  him  to  cultivate  the  essay  mainly,  others  discerned  the 
supremacy  of  his  story-telling  faculty,  and,  years  before  the  public 
fell  in  love  with  Treasure  Island,  bade  him  cultivate  that.  Fortu- 
nately he  did  so ;  and  his  too  short  life  has  left  a  fairly  ample 
store  of  work,  not  always  quite  equal,  seldom  quite  without  a 
flaw,  but  charming,  stimulating,  distinguished  as  few  things  in  this 
last  quarter  of  a  century  have  been.1 

Nearly  all  of  Mr.  Stevenson's  contemporaries  in  novel-writing, 
as  well  as  many  distinguished  persons  far  his  seniors  whose  names 
will  occur  to  every  one,  lie  outside  our  limits.  And  in  no  chapter 
of  this  book,  perhaps,  is  it  so  necessary  to  turn  the  back  sternly 
on  much  interesting  performance  once  famous  and  popular — not 
once  only  of  interest  to  the  reader  of  time  and  chance,  but  put  by 
this  cause  or  that  out  of  our  reach.  We  cannot  talk  here  of  Emilia 
Wyndhaw  or  of  Paul  Ferroll,  both  emphatically  novels  of  their 
day,  and  that  no  short  one ;  and  in  the  latter  case,  if  not  in  the 
former,  books  deserving  to  be  read  at  intervals  by  more  than  the 
bookworm.  The  exquisite  Story  without  an  End,  which  Sarah 
Austin  half  adapted,  half  translated,  and  which,  with  some  un- 
usually good  translations  from  Fouque  and  others,  set  a  whole 
fashion  fifty  years  ago,  must  pass  with  mere  allusion  ;  the  abundant 
and  not  seldom  excellent  fiction  of  the  earlier  High  Church 
movement  pleads  in  vain  for  detailed  treatment.  For  all  doors 
must  be  shut  or  open  ;  and  this  door  must  now  be  shut. 

1  The  posthumous  fragment  Weir  of  Hcrmiston  (1896)  not  only  makes  ini- 
poi  tant  additions  to  the  writer's  character-list,  but  shows  his  style  in  an  easiei 
and  more  fully  fused  condition  than  before.  St.  Ivcs,  a  later  posthumous  addition, 
more  nearly  completed,  is  less  of  an  advance,  and  has  even  the  curious  appearance 
of  being  an  attempt  to  imitate  some  of  the  author's  own  imitators. 


CHAPTER    VIII 

PHILOSOPHY    AND    THEOLOOY 

IT  is  the  constant  difficulty  of  the  literary  historian,  especially  if 
he  is  working  on  no  very  great  scale,  that  he  is  confronted  with 
what  may  be  called  "applied"  literature,  in  which  not  only  is  the 
matter  of  superior  importance  to  the  form,  but  the  importance  of 
the  matter  itself  disappears  to  a  greater  or  less  extent  with  time. 
In  these  cases  it  is  only  possible  for  him  to  take  notice  of  those 
writers  who,  whatever  the  subject  they  handled,  would  have 
written  literature,  and  perhaps  of  those  who  from  the  unusual 
eminence  and  permanence  of  their  position  in  their  own  subjects 
have  attained  as  it  were  an  honorary  position  in  literature  itself. 

The  literary  importance  and  claim,  however,  of  these  applied 
branches  varies  considerably;  and  there  have  been  times  when 
the  two  divisions  whose  names  stand  at  the  head  of  this  chapter 
even  surpassed  —  there  have  been  not  a  few  in  which  they 
equalled — any  section  of  the  purest  belles  Icttres  in  strictly  literary 
attractions.  With  rare  exceptions  this  has  not  been  the  case 
during  the  present  century — poetry,  fiction,  history,  and  essay- 
writing  having  drawn  off  the  best  hands  on  the  one  side,  while 
science  has  attracted  them  on  the  other.  But  the  great  Oxford 
Movement  in  the  second  quarter  created  no  small  amount  of 
theological  or  ecclesiastical  writing  of  unusual  interest,  while  there 
had  been  earlier,  and  continued  to  be  till  almost  the  time  when 
the  occupation  of  the  field  by  living  writers  warns  us  off, 
philosophers  proper  of  great  excellence.  Latterly  (indeed  till 


CHAP,  vin  BENTHAM  363 

quite  recently,  when  a  certain  renaissance  of  philosophical  writing, 
not  in  jargon,  has  taken  place,  with  a  corresponding  depression  of 
the  better  kind  of  literary  theology)  the  philosophers  of  Britain 
have  not  held  a  prominent  place  in  her  literature.  Whether  this 
was  because  they  have  mostly  been  content  to  Germanise,  or 
because  they  have  not  been  provided  with  sufficient  individual 
talent,  it  is  fortunately  unnecessary  for  us  to  attempt  to  determine 
in  this  place  and  at  this  time. 

Among  the  dead  writers  of  the  century  who  are  known  wholly 
or  mainly  for  the  cultivation  of  philosophical  studies,  Bentham, 
Mackintosh,  John  Stuart  Mill  (to  whom  some  would  add  his  father 
James),  Sir  William  Hamilton,  Dean  Mansel,  are  likely  to  hold  a 
place  in  history,  while  at  present  many  might  be  disposed  to  add 
the  name  of  Mr.  T.  H.  Green,  a  tutor  of  Balliol  College,  who 
between  1870  and  his  death  propagated  in  Oxford  a  sort  of  neo- 
Hegelianism  much  tinctured  with  political  and  social  Liberalism, 
and  obtained  a  remarkable  personal  position.  It  is,  however,  as 
yet  too  early  to  assign  a  distinct  historical  place  to  one  whose 
philosophy  was  in  no  sense  original,  though  it  was  somewhat 
originally  combined  and  applied,  and  who  exhibited  very  small 
literary  skill  in  setting  forth.  The  others  are  already  set  "  in  the 
firm  perspective  of  the  past,"  and,  with  yet  others  who,  still  living, 
escape  our  grasp,  have  their  names  clearly  marked  for  a  place  in 
an  adequate  history. 

Jeremy  Bentham,  a  curious  person  who  reminds  one  of  a 
Hobbes  without  the  literary  genius,  was  born  in  London,  near 
Houndsditch,  as  far  back  as  5th  February  1748.  He  was  the  son 
of  a  solicitor  who  was  very  well  off,  and  wished  his  son  to  take  to 
the  superior  branch  of  the  law.  Jeremy  was  sent  to  Westminster, 
and  thence  to  Queen's  College,  Oxford,  in  his  thirteenth  year. 
He  was  a  Master  of  Arts  at  eighteen,  and  was  called  to  the  Bar 
six  years  later,  but  he  never  practised.  He  must  have  been  very 
early  drawn  to  the  study  of  the  French  philosophes ;  much  indeed 
of  the  doctrine  which  afterwards  made  him  famous  was  either 
taken  from,  or  incidentally  anticipated  by,  Turgot  and  others  of 


364  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

them,  and  it  was  a  common  remark,  half  in  earnest  halt"  in  gibe, 
that  Bentham's  views  had  made  the  tour  of  Europe  in  the  French 
versions  of  Dumont  before  they  attained  to  any  attention  in 
England.  In  1776  he  wrote  a  Fragment  on  Government,  a  kind  of 
critique  of  Blackstone,  which  is  distinguished  by  acute,  one-sided 
deduction  from  Whig  principles  ;  and  he  became  a  sort  of  prophet 
of  the  Whigs,  who  sometimes  plagiarised  and  popularised,  some- 
times neglected,  his  opinions.  He  never  married,  though  he 
would  have  liked  to  do  so ;  and  lived  on  his  means  till  1832,  when 
he  died  in  the  eighty-fifth  year  of  his  age.  His  chief  books  after 
the  Fragment  had  been  his  Theory  of  Punishments  and  Rewards  ; 
1787,  Letter  son  Usury ;  1 789,  Introduction  to  the  Principles  of  Morals 
and  Legislation;  1813,  Treatise  on  Evidence ;  and  1824,  Fallacies. 
The  central  pillar  and  hinge  of  all  Bentham's  doctrines  in 
politics,  morals,  and  law  is  the  famous  principle  of  Utility,  or  to 
use  the  cant  phrase  which  he  borrowed  from  Priestley,  "  the 
greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number."  What  the  greatest 
number  is — for  instance,  whether  in  a  convict  settlement  of  forty 
thieves  and  ten  honest  men,  the  thieves  are  to  be  consulted — and 
what  happiness  means,  what  is  utility,  what  things  have  brought 
existing  arrangements  about,  and  what  the  loss  of  altering  them 
might  be,  as  well  as  a  vast  number  of  other  points,  Bentham 
never  deigned  to  consider.  Starting  from  a  few  crude  phrases  such 
as  this,  he  raised  a  system  remarkable  for  a  sort  of  apparent 
consistency  and  thoroughness,  and  having  the  luck  or  the  merit 
to  hit  off  in  parts  not  a  few  of  the  popular  desires  and  fads  of  the 
age  of  the  French  Revolution  and  its  sequel.  But  he  was  a 
political  theorist  rather  than  a  political  philosopher,  his  neglect  of 
all  the  nobler  elements  of  thought  and  feeling  was  complete,  and 
latterly  at  least  he  wrote  atrocious  English,  clumsy  in  composition 
and  crammed  with  technical  jargon.  The  brilliant  fashion  in 
which  Sydney  Smith  has  compressed  and  spirited  his  Fallacies 
into  the  famous  "Noodle's  Oration"  is  an  example  of  the  kind  of 
treatment  which  Bentham  requires  in  order  to  be  made  tolerable 
in  form,  and  even  then  he  remains  one-sided  in  fact. 


viii  MACKINTOSH— THE  MILLS  365 

Sir  James  Mackintosh  has  been  mentioned  before,  and  is  less 
of  a  philosopher  pure  and  simple  than  any  person  included  in 
this  list — indeed  his  philosophical  reputation  rests  almost  wholly 
upon  his  brilliant,  though  rather  slight,  Dissertation  on  Ethics  for 
the  Encyclopedia  Britannica.  The  greater  part  by  far  of  his  by  no 
means  short  life  (1765-1832)  was  occupied  in  practising  medicine 
and  law,  in  defending  the  French  Revolution  against  Burke, 
(  Vindicice  Gallicce,  1791) ;  in  defending  the  French  Royalists  in  the 
person  of  Peltier  against  Bonaparte,  1803  ;  in  acting  as  Recorder 
and  Judge  in  India,  1804-1811;  and  in  political  and  literary 
work  at  home  for  the  last  twenty  years,  his  literature  being  chiefly 
history,  and  contributions  to  the  Edinburgh  Review.  But  there 
has  been  a  certain  tendency,  both  in  his  own  time  and  since,  to 
regard  Mackintosh  as  a  sort  of  philosopher  thrown  away.  He  was, 
however,  much  more  of  a  rhetorician ;  and  some  of  his  rhetoric 
was  most  pitilessly  caricatured  by  Sydney  Smith,  a  political 
sympathiser  and  a  personal  friend.  But  he  wrote  very  well,  and 
was  a  sound  and  on  the  whole  a  fair  critic. 

Of  the  two  Mills,  the  elder,  James,  was  like  Mackintosh  only 
an  interim  philosopher :  his  son  John  belongs  wholly  to  our 
present  subject.  James  was  the  son  of  a  farmer,  was  born  near 
Montrose  in  1773,  and  intended  to  enter  the  ministry,  but  became 
a  journalist  instead.  In  the  ten  years  or  so  after  1806,  he  com- 
posed a  History  of  British  India,  which  was  long  regarded  as 
authoritative,  but  on  which  the  gravest  suspicions  have  recently 
been  cast.  Mill,  in  fact,  was  a  violent  politician  of  the  Radical 
type,  and  his  opinions  of  ethics  were  so  peculiar  that  it  is  un- 
certain how  far  he  might  have  carried  them  in  dealing  with 
historical  characters.  His  book,  however,  gained  him  a  high  post 
in  the  East  India  Company,  the  Directors  of  which  just  at  that 
time  were  animated  by  a  wish  to  secure  distinguished  men  of 
letters  as  servants.  He  nevertheless  continued  to  write  a  good 
deal  both  in  periodicals  and  in  book  form,  the  chief  examples  of 
the  latter  being  his  Political  Economy,  his  Analysis  of  the  Ihitnan 
Mind,  and  his  Fragment  on  Mackintosh.  James  Mill,  of  whom 


366  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

most  people  have  conceived  a  rather  unfavourable  idea  since  the 
appearance  of  his  son's  Autobiography,  was  an  early  disciple  of 
Bentham,  and  to  a  certain  extent  resembled  him  in  hard  clearness 
and  superficial  consistency. 

His  son  John  Stuart  was  born  in  London  on  2oth  May  1806, 
and  educated  by  his  father  in  the  unnatural  fashion  which  he  has 
himself  recorded.  Intellectually,  however,  he  was  not  neglected, 
and  after  some  years,  spent  mainly  in  France,  he  was,  through  his 
father's  influence,  appointed  at  seventeen  to  a  clerkship  in  the 
India  House,  which  gave  him  a  competence  for  the  rest  of  his 
life  and  a  main  occupation  for  thirty-four  years  of  it.  He  was 
early  brought  into  contact  (by  his  father's  friendship  with  Grote 
and  others)  with  the  Philosophical  Radicals,  as  well  as  with  many 
men  of  letters,  especially  Carlyle,  of  the  destruction  of  the  first 
version  of  whose  French  Revolution  Mill  (having  lent  it  to  his 
friend  Mrs.  Taylor)  was  the  innocent  cause.  To  this  Mrs.  Taylor, 
whom  he  afterwards  married,  Mill  was  fanatically  attached,  the 
attachment  being  the  cause  of  some  curious  flights  in  his  later 
work.  His  character  was  very  amiable,  and  the  immense 
influence  which,  especially  in  the  later  years  of  his  life,  he  exer- 
cised, was  partly  helped  by  his  personal  friendships.  But  it  was 
unfortunate  for  him  that  in  1865  he  was  returned  to  Parliament. 
His  political  views,  though  it  was  the  eve  of  the  triumph  of  what 
might  be  called  his  party,  were  doctrinaire  and  out  of  date,  and 
his  life  had  given  him  no  practical  hold  of  affairs,  so  that  he  more 
than  fulfilled  the  usual  prophecy  of  failure  in  the  case  of  men  of 
thought  who  are  brought  late  in  life  into  action.  Fortunately  for 
him  he  was  defeated  in  1868,  and  passed  the  rest  of  his  life 
mostly  in  France,  dying  at  Avignon  on  8th  May  1873. 

Brought  up  in  an  atmosphere  of  discussion  and  of  books, 
Mill  soon  took  to  periodical  writing,  and  in  early  middle  life  was 
for  some  years  editor  of  the  London  and  Westminster  Review  ;  but 
his  literary  ambition,  which  directed  itself  not  to  pure  literature, 
but  to  philosophical  and  political  discussion,  was  not  content  with 
periodical  writing  as  an  exercise,  and  his  circumstances  enabled 


vni  J.   S.   MILL  367 

him  to  do  without  it  as  a  business.  In  1843  he  published  what 
is  undoubtedly  his  chief  work,  A  System  of  Logic,  Ratiocinative  and 
Inductive;  five  years  later  a  companion  treatise  on  Political 
Economy,  which  may  perhaps  rank  second.  In  1859  his  essay  on 
Liberty,  a  short  but  very  attractive  exposition  of  his  political 
principles,  appeared ;  next  year  a  collection  of  essays  entitled 
Dissertations  and  Discussions.  After  lesser  works  on  Utilitarian- 
ism and  on  Comte,  of  whom  he  had  been  a  supporter  in  more 
senses  than  one,  but  whose  later  eccentricities  revolted  him,  he 
issued  in  1865  his  Examination  of  Sir  William  Hamilton's  Philo- 
sophy, which  ranks  as  the  third  of  his  chief  works,  and  completes 
his  system,  as  far  as  a  system  so  negative  can  be  said  to  be  com- 
pleted, on  the  side  of  theology  and  metaphysics.  Among  his 
smaller  works  may  be  mentioned  Representative  Government,  and 
(very  late)  the  fanatical  and  curious  Subjection  of  Women.  His 
Autobiography,  an  interesting  but  melancholy  book,  appeared 
shortly  after  his  death. 

Mill  must  be  accounted  on  the  whole  by  good  judges,  even  if 
they  are  utterly  opposed  to  his  whole  system  of  philosophy,  the 
chief  philosophical  writer  of  England  in  this  century ;  and  the 
enormous  though  not  permanent  influence  which  he  attained 
about  its  middle  was  deserved,  partly  by  qualities  purely  literary, 
but  partly  also  by  some  purely  philosophical.  He  had  inherited 
from  his  father  not  merely  the  theoretical  exaltation  of  liberty 
(except  in  the  philosophical  sense)  which  characterised  eighteenth 
century  philosophers,  but  also  that  arrogant  and  pragmatical  im- 
patience of  the  supernatural  which  was  to  a  still  greater  extent 
that  century's  characteristic.  The  arrogance  and  the  pragma- 
ticality  changed  in  John  Stuart  Mill's  milder  nature  to  a  sort  of 
nervous  dread  of  admitting  even  the  possibility  of  things  not 
numerable,  ponderable,  and  measurable  ;  and  it  may  be  observed 
with  amusement  that  for  the  usual  division  of  logic  into  Deduc- 
tive and  Inductive  he  substituted Ratiocinatire  for  the  first  member, 
so  as  not  even  by  implication  to  admit  the  possibility  of  deduction 
from  any  principles  not  inductively  given.  So,  too,  later,  in  his 


368  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

Examination  of  Sir  William  Hamilton,  between  the  opposing 
spectres  of  Realism  and  Idealism,  he  was  driven  to  take  refuge  in 
what  he  called  "  permanent  possibilities "  of  Sensation,  though 
logicians  vainly  asked  how  he  assured  himself  of  the  permanence, 
and  jesters  rudely  observed  that  to  call  a  bottle  of  gin  a  "  per- 
manent possibility  of  drunkenness  "  was  an  unnecessary  complica- 
tion of  language  for  a  very  small  end  or  meaning.  His  great 
philosophical  weapon  (borrowed  from,  though  of  course  not  in- 
vented by  his  father)  was  the  Association  of  Ideas,  just  as  his  clue 
in  political  economy  was  in  the  main  though  not  exclusively 
laissez-faire,  in  ethics  a  modified  utilitarianism,  and  in  politics  an 
absolute  deference  to,  tempered  by  a  resigned  distrust  of,  the 
majority.  The  defect  in  a  higher  and  11.  re  architectonic  theory 
of  the  world  with  which  he  has  been  charged  is  not  quite  justly 
chargeable,  for  from  his  point  of  view  no  such  theory  was  possible. 

Even  those,  however,,  who,  as  the  present  writer  acknowledges 
in  his  own  case,  are  totally  opposed  to  the  whole  Millian  con- 
ception of  logic  and  politics,  of  metaphysics  and  morality,  must, 
unless  prejudiced,  admit  his  great  merits  of  method  and  treatment. 
He  not  only  very  seldom  smuggles  in  sophistry  into  the  middle  of 
his  arguments,  but  even  paralogisms  are  not  common  with  him  ; 
it  is  with  his  premisses,  not  with  his  conclusions,  that  you  must 
deal  if  you  wish  to  upset  him.  Unlike  most  contemners  of  formal 
logic,  he  is  not  in  much  danger,  as  far  as  his  merely  dialectic 
processes  go,  from  formal  logic  itself;  and  it  is  in  the  arbitrary 
and  partial  character  of  his  preliminary  admissions,  assumptions, 
and  exclusions  that  the  weak  points  of  his  system  are  to  be 
found. 

His  style  has  also  very  considerable  merits.  It  is  not  brilliant 
or  charming;  it  has  neither  great  strength  nor  great  stateliness. 
But  it  is  perfectly  clear,  it  is  impossible  to  mistake  its  meaning, 
and  its  simplicity  is  unattended  by  any  of  the  down  at-heel  neglect 
of  neatness  and  elegance  which  is  to  be  found,  for  instance,  in 
Locke.  Little  scholastic  as  In.'  was  in  m-ist  ways,  Mill  had  far 
outgrown  the  ignorant  eighteenth  century  contempt  of  the  School 


HAMILTON  369 


men,  and  had  learnt  from  them  an  exact  precision  of  statement 
and  argument,  while  he  had  managed  to  keep  (without  its  con- 
comitant looseness  and  vulgarity)  much  of  the  eighteenth  century's 
wholesome  aversion  to  jargon  and  to  excess  of  terminology.  In 
presenting  complicated  statements  of  detail,  as  in  the  Political 
Economy,  the  Representative  Government,  and  elsewhere,  he  has 
as  much  lucidity  as  Macaulay,  with  an  almost  total  freedom  from 
Macaulay's  misleading  and  delusive  suppression  of  material  details. 
And  besides  his  usual  kind  of  calm  and  measured  argument,  he 
can  occasionally,  as  in  divers  passages  of  the  Sir  William  Hamil- 
ton and  the  political  books,  rise  or  sink  from  the  logical  and 
rhetorical  points  of  view  respectively  to  an  impassioned  advocacy, 
which,  though  it  may  be  rarely  proof  against  criticism,  is  very 
agreeable  so  far  as  it  goes.  That  Mill  wholly  escaped  the  defects 
of  the  popular  philosopher,  I  do  not  suppose  that  even  those  who 
sympathise  with  his  views  would  contend ;  though  they  might 
not  admit,  as  others  would,  that  these  defects  were  inseparable 
from  his  philosophy  in  itself.  But  it  may  be  doubtful  whether, 
all  things  considered,  a  better  literary  type  of  the  popular 
philosopher  exists  in  modern  English ;  and  it  certainly  is  not 
surprising  that,  falling  in  as  he  did  with  the  current  mode  of 
thought,  and  providing  it  with  a  defence  specious  in  reasoning 
and  attractive  in  language,  he  should  have  attained  an  influence 
perhaps  greater  than  that  of  which  any  English  philosophical 
writer  has  been  able  during  his  lifetime  to  boast. 

The  convenience  of  noticing  the  Mills  together,  and  of  putting 
Sir  \Villiam  Hamilton  next  to  his  most  famous  disciples,  seems 
to  justify  a  certain  departure  from  strict  chronological  order. 
Hamilton  was  indeed  considerably  the  senior  of  his  critic,  having 
been  born  on  8th  March  1788.  His  father  and  grandfather,  both 
professors  at  the  University  of  Glasgow,  had  been  plain  "  Dr. 
Hamilton."  But  they  inherited,  and  Sir  William  made  good,  the 
claim  to  a  baronetcy  which  had  been  in  abeyance  since  the  days 
of  Robert  Hamilton,  the  Covenanting  leader.  He  himself  pro- 
ceeded from  Glasgow,  with  a  Snell  Exhibition,  to  Halliol  in  1809. 

2   15 


370  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

He  was  called  to  the  Scottish  Bar,  but  never  practised,  though 
some  business  came  to  him  as  Crown  solicitor  in  the  Court  of 
Teinds  (tithes).  He  competed  in  1820  for  the  Chair  of  Moral 
Philosophy,  which  Wilson,  with  far  inferior  claims,  obtained ;  but 
it  is  fair  to  say  that  at  the  time  the  one  candidate  had  given  no 
more  public  proofs  of  fitness  than  the  other.  Soon,  however,  he 
began  to  make  his  mark  as  a  contributor  of  philosophical  articles 
to  the  Edinburgh  Review,  and  in  1836  he  obtained  a  professorship 
in  the  University  for  which  he  was  even  better  fitted — that  of 
Logic  and  Metaphysics.  His  lectures  became  celebrated,  but  he 
never  published  them ;  indeed  his  only  publication  of  any  im- 
portance during  his  lifetime  was  a  collection  of  his  articles  under 
the  title  of  Dissertations,  with  the  exception  of  his  monumental 
edition  of  Reid,  on  which  he  spent,  and  on  which  it  has  some- 
times been  held  that  he  wasted,  most  of  his  time.  He  died  in 
1856,  and  his  lectures  were  published  after  his  death  by  his 
assistant,  Professor  Veitch  (himself  an  enthusiastic  devotee  of 
literature,  especially  Border  literature,  as  well  as  of  philosophy), 
and  his  greatest  disciple,  Mansel,  between  1859  and  1861.  And 
this  was  how  Mill's  Examination  came  to  be  posthumous.  The 
"Philosophy  of  the  Conditioned,"  as  Hamilton's  is  for  shortness 
called,  could  not  be  described  in  any  brief,  and  perhaps  not  with 
propriety  in  any,  space  of  the  present  volume.  It  is  enough  to 
say  that  it  was  an  attempt  to  reinforce  the  so-called  "Scotch 
Philosophy"  of  Reid  against  Hume  by  the  help  of  Kant,  as  well 
as  at  once  to  continue  and  evade  the  latter  without  resorting 
either  to  Transcendentalism  or  to  the  experience-philosophy 
popular  in  England.  In  logic,  Hamilton  was  a  great  and  justly 
honoured  defender  of  the  formal  view  of  the  science  which  had 
been  in  persistent  disrepute  during  the  eighteenth  century;  but 
some  of  the  warmest  lovers  of  logic  doubt  whether  his  technical 
inventions  or  discoveries,  such  as  the  famous  Quantification  of 
the  Predicate,  are  more  than  "  pretty "  in  the  sense  of  mathe- 
maticians and  wine-merchants.  This  part  of  his  doctrine,  by  the 
way,  attracted  special  attention,  and  was  carefully  elaborated  by 


HAMILTON — FERRIER  371 


another  disciple,  Professor  Thomas  Spencer  Baynes  (1823-1887), 
who,  after  chequering  philosophy  with  journalism,  became  editor  of 
the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  and  a  careful  Shakespearian  student. 
Yet  another  disciple,  and  the  most  distinguished  save  one,  was 
James  Frederick  Ferrier,  nephew  of  Susan  Ferrier,  to  whom 
we  owe  three  most  brilliant  novels,  who  was  born  in  1808 
and  died  in  1864  at  St.  Andrews,  where  he  had  for  nearly 
twenty  years  been  Professor  of  Moral  Philosophy,  after  previously 
holding  for  a  short  time  a  History  Professorship  at  Edinburgh. 
Of  this  latter  University  Ferrier  had  been  an  alumnus,  as  well  as  of 
Oxford.  He  edited  his  father-in-law  Wilson's  works,  and  was  a 
contributor  to  Blackivood's  Magazine,  but  his  chief  book  was  his 
Institutes  of  Metaphysics,  published  in  1854.  Too  strong  a 
Hamiltonian  influence  (not  in  style  but  in  some  other  ways),  and 
an  attempt  at  an  almost  Spinosian  rigidity  of  method,  have  some- 
times been  held  to  have  marred  Ferrier's  philosophical  perform- 
ance ;  but  it  is  certain  that  he  had  the  makings  of  a  great  meta- 
physician, and  that  he  was  actually  no  small  one. 

The  great  merit  of  Hamilton  was  that  he,  in  a  somewhat 
irregular  and  informal  way  (for,  as  has  been  said,  he  was  ostensibly 
more  a  commentator  and  critic  than  an  independent  theorist), 
introduced  German  speculation  into  England  after  a  fashion 
far  more  thorough  than  the  earlier  but  dilettante  and  haphazard 
attempts  of  De  Quincey  and  Coleridge,  and  contributed  vastly  to 
the  lifting  of  the  whole  tone  and  strain  of  English  philosophic 
disputation  from  the  slovenly  common-sense  into  which  it  had 
fallen.  In  fact,  he  restored  metaphysics  proper  as  a  part  of 
English  current  thought,  and  helped  (though  here  he  was  not 
alone)  to  restore  logic.  His  defects  were,  in  the  first  place,  that 
he  was  at  once  too  systematic  and  too  piecemeal  in  theory,  and 
worse  still,  that  his  philosophical  style  was  one  of  the  very  worst 
existing  or  that  could  exist.  That  this  may  have  been  in  some 
degree  a  designed  reaction  from  ostentatious  popularity  is  probable; 
and  that  it  was  in  great  part  caught  from  his  studious  frequenta- 
tion  of  that  Hercynian  forest  which  takes  the  place  of  the  groves 


372  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 


of  Academe  in  German  philosophical  writing  is  certain.  But 
the  hideousness  of  his  dialect  is  a  melancholy  fact ;  and  it  may 
be  said  to  have  contributed  at  least  as  much  to  the  decadence  of 
his  philosophical  vogue  as  any  defects  in  the  philosophy  itself. 
He  was,  in  fact,  at  the  antipodes  from  Mill  in  attractiveness  of 
form  as  well  as  in  character  of  doctrine. 

There  are  some  who  think  that  Henry  Longueville  Mansel  was 
actually  in  more  than  one  respect,  and  might,  with  some  slight 
changes  of  accidental  circumstance,  have  been  indisputably,  the 
greatest  philosopher  of  Britain  in  the  nineteenth  century.  Of  the 
opinion  entertained  by  contemporaries  of  great  intellectual  gifts, 
that  of  Mark  Pattison,  a  bitter  political  and  academical  opponent, 
and  the  most  acrimonious  critic  of  his  time,  that  Mansel  was, 
though  according  to  Pattison's  view  an  "arch-jobber,"  an  "acute 
thinker  and  a  metaphysician "  seems  pretty  conclusive.  But 
Mansel  died  in  middle  age ;  he  was  much  occupied  in  various 
kinds  of  university  business,  and  he  is  said  by  those  who  knew 
him  to  have  been  personally  rather  indolent.  He  was  born  in 
Northamptonshire  on  6th  October  1820,  and  after  schooldays  at 
Merchant  Taylors'  passed  in  the  then  natural  course  to  St.  John's 
College,  Oxford,  of  which  he  became  Fellow.  He  was  an  active 
opponent  of  the  first  University  Commission,  in  reference  to  which 
he  wrote  the  most  brilliant  satire  of  the  kind  proper  to  university 
wits  which  this  century  has  produced — -the  Aristophanic  parody 
entitled  Phrontisterion,  But  the  Commission  returned  him  good 
for  evil,  insomuch  as  he  became  the  first  Waynflete  Professor  of 
Moral  and  Metaphysical  Philosophy,  a  post  created  in  consequence 
of  it.  In  1859  he  was  Bampton  Lecturer,  and  his  sermons  in 
this  office  again  attained  the  first  excellence  in  style,  though  they 
were  made  the  subject  of  severe  criticism  not  merely  by  the 
disciples  of  liberal  philosophy,  but  by  some  timid  defenders  of 
orthodoxy,  for  their  bold  application  of  the  philosophy  of  the  con- 
ditioned, on  scholastic  lines,  to  the  problems  of  theodicy.  Mansel 
was  not  a  more  frequent  lecturer  than  the  somewhat  indulgent 
conditions  of  the  English  Universities,  especially  Oxford,  even 


vin  MANSEL  373 

after  the  Commission,  required ;  but  his  deliverances  were  of 
exceptional  importance,  both  in  conception  and  expression.  At 
the  death  of  Milman,  his  political  friends  being  in  power,  he  was 
made  Dean  of  St.  Paul's,  but  enjoyed  the  dignity  only  a  short 
time,  and  died  in  1871.  Besides  Phrontisterion  and  his  Bampton 
Lectures,  which  bring  him  under  both  the  divisions  of  this 
chapter,  he  had  published  in  his  lifetime  an  excellent  edition  of 
Aldrich's  "  Logic,"  Prolegomena  Logica  (the  principal  work  of  the 
Hamiltonian  school,  though  quite  independent  in  main  points), 
and  an  enlarged  edition  of  an  Encyclopaedia  dissertation  on 
Metaphysics.  His  essays,  chiefly  from  the  Quarterly  Review, 
were  published  after  his  death,  with  Phrontisterion  and  other 
things. 

It  will  appear  from  this  brief  summary  that  Mansel  was  a 
many-sided  man ;  and  it  may  be  added  that  he  possessed  an 
exceptionally  keen  wic,  by  no  means  confined  to  professional  sub- 
jects, and  was  altogether  far  more  of  a  man  of  the  world  than  is 
usual  in  a  philosopher.  But  though  this  man-of-the-worldliness 
may  have  affected  the  extent  and  quantity  of  his  philosophical 
work,  it  did  not  touch  the  quality  of  it.  It  may  be  contended 
that  Mansel  was  on  the  whole  rather  intended  for  a  critic  or 
historian  of  philosophy  than  for  an  independent  philosophical 
teacher  ;  and  in  this  he  would  but  have  exhibited  a  tendency  of  his 
century.  Yet  he  was  very  far  from  mere  slavish  following  even 
of  Hamilton,  while  the  copying,  with  a  little  travesty  and  adjust- 
ment, of  German  originals,  on  which  so  much  philosophical  repute 
has  been  founded  in  England,  was  entirely  foreign  to  his  nature 
and  thought.  In  Mill's  Examination  of  Hamilton,  the  Bampton 
Lectures,  above  referred  to,  came  in  for  the  most  vehement 
protest,  for  Mill,  less  blind  than  the  orthodox  objectors,  perceived 
that  their  drift  was  to  steer  clear  of  some  of  the  commonest  and 
most  dangerous  reefs  and  shoals  on  which  the  orthodoxy  of 
intelligent  but  not  far-sighted  minds  has  for  some  generations  past 
been  wrecked.  But  Mansel's  rejoinder,  written  at  a  time  when 
he  was  more  than  ever  distracted  by  avocations,  and  hampered 


374  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 


certainly  by  the  necessity  of  speaking  for  his  master  as  well  as  for 
himself,  and  probably  by  considerations  of  expediency  in  respect 
to  the  duller  of  the  faithful,  was  not  his  happiest  work.  In  fact 
he  was  too  clear  and  profound  a  thinker  to  be  first-rate  in  con- 
troversy— a  function  which  requires  either  unusual  dishonesty  or 
one-sidedness  in  an  unusual  degree.  He  may  sometimes  have 
been  a  very  little  of  a  sophist — it  is  perhaps  impossible  to  be  a  great 
philosopher  without  some  such  touch.  But  of  paralogism  —  of 
that  sincere  advancing  of  false  argument  which  from  the  time  of 
Plato  has  been  justly  regarded  as  the  most  fatal  of  philosophic 
drawbacks — there  is  no  trace  in  Mansel.  His  natural  genius, 
moreover,  assisted  by  his  practice  in  miscellaneous  writing,  which 
though  much  less  in  amount  of  result  than  Mill's  was  even  more 
various  in  kind,  equipped  him  with  a  most  admirable  philosophical 
style,  hitting  the  exact  mean  between  the  over-popular  and  the 
over-technical,  endowing  even  the  Prolegomena  Logica  with  a 
perfect  readableness,  and  in  the  Metaphysics  and  large  parts  of 
the  editorial  matter  of  the  Aldrich  showing  capacities  which  make 
it  deeply  to  be  regretted  that  he  never  undertook  a  regular  history 
of  philosophy. 

The  place  which  might  have  been  thus  filled,  was  accepted 
but  partially  and  with  no  capital  success  by  divers  writers. 
Frederick  Denison  Maurice,  who  will  be  mentioned  again  in 
this  chapter,  wrote  on  Moral  and  Metaphysical  Philosophy,  but 
the  book,  though  like  all  his  work  attractively  written,  does  not 
show  very  wide  or  very  profound  knowledge  of  the  subject.  The 
Lectures  on  the  History  of  Ancient  Philosophy,  by  William  Archer 
Butler,  a  Dublin  professor,  who  died  prematurely,  would  prob- 
ably, had  the  author  lived,  have  formed  the  best  history  of  the 
subject  in  English,  and  even  in  their  fragmentary  condition  make 
an  admirable  book,  free  from  jargon,  not  unduly  popular,  but  at 
once  sound  and  literary.  The  most  ambitious  attempt  at  the 
whole  subject  was  that  of  George  Henry  Lewes,  the  companion  of 
George  Eliot,  a  versatile  man  of  letters  of  great  ability,  who 
brought  out  on  a  small  scale  in  1845,  an(J  afterwards  on  a  much 


WHATELY — WHEWELL 


375 


larger  one,  a  Biographical  History  of  Philosophy.  This,  though 
occasionally  superficial,  and  too  much  tinged  with  a  sort  of 
second-hand  Positivism,  had,  as  the  qualities  of  these  defects,  an 
excellent  though  sometimes  a  rather  treacherous  clearness,  and  a 
unity  of  vision  which  is  perhaps  more  valuable  for  fairly  intelligent 
readers  than  desultory  profundity.  But  it  can  hardly  take  rank 
as  a  book  of  philosophical  scholarship,  though  it  is  almost  a  brilliant 
specimen  of  popular  philosophical  literature. 

Philosophy,  science,  and  perhaps  theology  may  dispute  be- 
tween them  two  remarkable  figures,  nearly  contemporary,  the  one 
an  Oxford  and  the  other  a  Cambridge  man — Whately  and 
Whewell.  Besides  the  differences  which  their  respective  uni- 
versities impress  upon  nearly  all  strong  characters,  there  were 
others  between  them,  Whately  being  the  better  bred,  the  more 
accomplished  writer,  and  the  more  original,  Whewell  the  more 
widely  informed,  and  perhaps  the  more  thoroughgoing.  But 
both  were  curiously  English  in  a  sort  of  knock -me- down 
Johnsonian  dogmatism ;  and  both  were  in  consequence  extremely 
intolerant.  For  Whately's  so-called  impartiality  consisted  in 
being  equally  biassed  against  Evangelicals  and  Tractarians  ;  and 
both  were  accused  by  their  unfriends  of  being  a  little  addicted  to 
the  encouragement  of  flatterers  and  toadies.  Richard  Whately,  the 
elder,  was  born  in  London  in  1787,  his  father  being  a  clergyman 
in  the  enjoyment  of  several  pluralities.  He  went  to  Oriel,  gained 
a  fellowship  there  in  1811,  and  was  with  intervals  a  resident 
in  Oxford  for  some  twenty  years,  being  latterly  Principal  of  St. 
Alban  Hall  (where  he  made  Newman  his  Vice-Principal),  and  in 
1829  Professor  of  Political  Economy.  In  1831  the  Whigs  made 
him  Archbishop  of  Dublin,  which  difficult  post  he  held  for  more 
than  thirty  years  till  his  death  in  1863.  His  work  is  not  very 
extensive,  but  it  is  remarkable.  His  Historic  Doubts  relative  lo 
Napoleon  Bonaparte  was  an  exceedingly  clever  "skit"  on  the 
Rationalist  position  in  regard  to  miracles  and  biblical  criticism 
generally ;  though  Whately's  orthodoxy  was  none  of  the  strictest. 
His  Bampton  Lectures  on  Party  Feeling  in  Religion  preceded 


376  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

rather  curiously  the  greatest  outburst  of  the  said  party  feeling 
which  had  been  seen  in  England  since  the  seventeenth  century. 
But  the  books  by  which  he  is  or  was  most  widely  known  are  his 
Logic  and  Rhetoric,  expansions  of  Encyclopaedia  articles  (1826 
and  1828)  intentionally  popular  and  perhaps  almost  unnecessarily 
exoteric,  but  extremely  stimulating  and  clear.  Whately,  who  had 
some  points  in  common  with  Sydney  Smith,  was,  like  him,  in  part 
the  victim  of  the  extreme  want  of  accuracy  and  range  in  the 
Oxford  education  of  his  youth  ;  but  his  mental  and  literary  powers 
were  great. 

William  Whewell,  the  son  of  a  carpenter,  showed  talent  for 
mathematics  early,  and  obtaining  an  exhibition  at  Trinity,  Cam- 
bridge, became  fellow,  tutor,  and  Master  of  his  College.  He 
had  the  advantage,  which  his  special  studies  gave,  of  more 
thorough  training,  and  extended  his  attention  from  pure  and 
applied  mathematics  to  science  and  a  kind  of  philosophy.  His 
chief  works  were  The  History  (1837)  and  The  Philosophy  (1840)  of 
the  Inductive  Sciences,  his  Bridgewater  Treatise  on  Astronomy  and 
Physic  in  Reference  to  Natural  Philosophy  (1833)  and  his  Plurality 
of  Worlds  (1853)  being  also  famous  in  their  day;  but  he  wrote 
voluminously  in  various  kinds.  He  was  rather  a  bully,  and  his 
work  has  no  extraordinary  merit  of  style,  but  it  is  interesting  as 
being  among  the  latest  in  which  science  permitted  her  votaries 
not  to  specialise  very  much,  and  rather  to  apply  the  ancient 
education  to  the  new  subjects  than  to  be  wholly  theirs. 

If  the  difficulty  of  deciding  on  rejection  or  admission  be  great 
in  the  case  of  philosophers  proper,  much  greater  is  it  in  the 
numerous  subdivisions  which  are  themselves  applied  philosophy 
as  philosophy  is  applied  literature.  The  two  chief  of  these  per- 
haps are  Jurisprudence  and  Political  Economy.  Under  the  head 
of  the  first,  three  remarkable  writers  at  least  absolutely  demand 
notice— Austin,  Maine,  and  Stephen.  The  first  of  these  was  in 
respect  of  influence,  if  not  also  of  actual  accomplishment,  one  of 
the  most  noteworthy  Englishmen  of  the  century.  Born  in  1790, 
he  died  in  1859,  having  begun  life  in  the  Army,  which  he  exchanged 


SIR  HENRY  MAINE  377 


for  the  Bar  not  long  after  Waterloo.  He  was  made  Professor  of 
Jurisprudence  in  the  new  University  College  of  London  in  1827. 
He  held  this  post  for  five  years  only ;  but  it  resulted  in  his  famous 
Province  of  Jurisprudence  Determined,  a  book  standing  more  or 
less  alone  in  English.  He  did  not  publish  much  else,  though  he 
did  some  official  work ;  and  his  Lectures  on  Jurisprudence  were 
posthumously  edited  by  his  wife,  a  Miss  Taylor  of  Norwich,  who 
has  been  referred  to  as  translator  of  the  Story  without  an  End, 
and  who  did  much  other  good  work.  Austin  (whose  younger 
brother  Charles  (1799-1874)  left  little  if  anything  in  print  but 
accumulated  a  great  fortune  at  the  Parliamentary  Bar,  and  left  a 
greater,  though  vague,  conversational  reputation)  had  bad  health 
almost  throughout  his  life,  and  his  work  is  not  large  in  bulk.  At 
first  pooh-poohed  and  neglected,  almost  extravagantly  prized  later, 
and  later  still,  according  to  the  usual  round,  a  little  cavilled  at,  it 
presents  Utilitarian  theory  at  its  best  in  the  intellectual  way ;  and 
its  disciplinary  value,  if  it  is  not  taken  for  gospel,  can  hardly  be 
overrated.  But  its  extreme  clearness,  closeness,  and  logical  pre- 
cision carry  with  them  the  almost  inevitable  defects  of  hardness, 
narrowness,  and  want  of  "  play,"  as  well  as  of  that  most  fatal  of 
intellectual  attitudes  which  takes  for  granted  that  everything  is 
explicable.  Still,  these  were  the  defects  of  Austin's  school  and  time; 
his  merits  were  individual,  and  indeed  very  nearly  unique. 

Sir  Henry  James  Sumner  Maine  was  bom  in  1822,  and 
educated  first  as  a  Blue  Coat  boy  and  then  at  Pembroke  College, 
Cambridge.  After  a  quite  exceptional  career  as  an  undergraduate, 
he  became  fellow  of  Trinity  Hall,  of  which  he  died  Master  in 
1888.  But  he  had  only  held  this  latter  post  for  eleven  years,  and 
the  midmost  of  his  career  was  occupied  with  quite  different  work. 
He  had  been  made  Professor  of  Civil  Law  in  his  University  in 
1847,  at  a  very  early  ane>  when  he  had  not  even  been  called  to  the 
Bar;  but  he  supplied  this  omission  three  years  later,  and  a  little 
later  still  exchanged  his  Cambridge  Professorship  for  a  Reader- 
ship at  Lincoln's  Inn.  In  1862  he  obtained  the  appointment, 
famous  from  its  connection  with  letters,  of  Legal  Member  of  the 


378  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 


Viceroy's  Council  in  India.  On  quitting  it  after  seven  years  he 
was  transferred  to  the  Council  at  Home,  and  became  Professor  of 
Comparative  Jurisprudence  at  Oxford.  Besides  his  work  as  a 
reviewer,  which  was  considerable,  Maine  wrote — in  an  admirable 
style,  and  with  a  scholarship  and  sense  which,  in  the  recrudes- 
cence of  more  barbaric  thought,  have  brought  down  socialist  and 
other  curses  on  his  head — many  works  on  the  philosophy  of  law, 
politics,  and  history,  the  chief  of  which  were  his  famous  Ancient 
Law  (1861),  Village  Communities  (1871),  Early  Law  and  Custom 
(1883),  with  a  severe  criticism  on  Democracy  called  Popular 
Government  (1885).  Few  writers  of  our  time  could  claim  the 
phrase  mi/is  sapientia  as  Maine  could,  though  it  is  possible  that 
he  was  a  little  too  much  given  to  theorise.  But  his  influence  in 
checking  that  of  Austin  was  admirable. 

A  colleague  of  Maine's  on  the  Saturday  Revieiv,  his  successor 
in  his  Indian  '  post,  like  him  a  malleus  demagogorum,  but  in 
some  ways  no  small  contrast,  was  Sir  James  Fitzjames  Stephen 
(1829-94),  the  most  distinguished  member  of  a  family  unusually 
distinguished  during  the  past  century  in  the  public  service  and  in 
literature.  His  father,  Sir  James  Stephen,  was  himself  well  known 
as  a  reviewer,  as  a  civil  servant,  as  Professor  of  Modern  History 
at  Cambridge,  and  as  author  of  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  History 
and  Lectures  on  the  History  of  France  (1849  and  1851).  The 
second  Sir  James  was  born  at  Kensington  in  1829,  went  to  Eton, 
thence  to  King's  College,  London,  and  thence  to  Trinity,  Cam- 
bridge, and  was  called  to  the  Bar  in  1854.  His  legal  career  was 
brilliant  and  varied,  and  led  him  to  the  Bench,  which  he  resigned 
shortly  before  his  death.  Sir  James  Stephen  published  some 
works  of  capital  importance  on  his  own  subject,  the  chief  relating 
to  the  Criminal  Law,  collected  both  earlier  and  later  a  good  deal  of 
his  Saturday  work,  discussed  a  famous  passage  of  Indian  History 
in  the  Story  of  Nuncomar  (1885),  and  wrote  not  a  little  criticism — 
political,  theological,  and  other  —  of  a  somewhat  negative  but 
admirably  clear-headed  kind  —  the  chief  expression  of  which  is 
Liberty,  Equality,  and  Fraternity  (1873). 


vin  MALTHUS  379 


Even  less  room  can  be  given  to  the  Political  Economists  than 
to  the  "Jurisprudents,"  partly  because  the  best  writers  of  them, 
such  as  J.  S.  Mill,  have  figured  or  will  figure  elsewhere ;  partly 
because,  from  Ricardo  to  Jevons  and  Cliffe  Leslie,  though  they 
have  often  displayed  no  mean  literary  power,  the  necessities  or 
supposed  necessities  of  their  subject  have  usually  kept  their  books 
further  away  from  belles  lettres  than  the  documents  of  any  other 
department  of  what  is  widely  called  philosophy.  But  a  paragraph 
must  at  least  be  given  to  one  of  the  earliest  and  one  of  the  most 
famous  of  them. 

If  a  prize  were  offered  to  the  best-abused  person  in  English 
literature,  few  competitors  would  have  much  chance  with  Thomas 
Robert  Malthus,  author  of  the  Essay  on  the  Principles  of  Popula- 
tion (1798),  and  of  divers  works  on  Political  Economy,  of  which 
he  was  Professor  in  the  East  India  College  at  Haileybury.  To 
judge  from  the  references  which  for  many  years  used  to  be,  and 
to  some  extent  still  are,  made  to  Malthus,  still  more  from  the  way 
in  which  the  term  "  Malthusian  "  is  still  often  used,  he  might  be 
supposed  to  have  been  a  reprobate  anarchist  and  revolutionary, 
who  had  before  his  eyes  neither  the  fear  of  God,  nor  the  love  of 
man,  nor  the  respect  of  morality  and  public  opinion.  As  a  matter 
of  fact  Malthus  was  a  most  respectable  and  amiable  clergyman, 
orthodox  I  believe  in  religion,  Tory  I  believe  in  politics,  who 
incurred  odium  chiefly  by  his  inculcation  of  the  most  disagreeable 
lessons  of  the  new  and  cheerless  science  which  he  professed. 
Born  on  24th  February  1766  near  Dorking,  of  a  very  respectable 
family,  he  went  to  Cambridge,  took  honours,  a  fellowship  at  his 
College  (Jesus),  and  orders,  obtained  a  benefice,  and  spent  most  of 
the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life  in  the  Professorship  above  referred 
to,  dying  in  1854.  His  Essay  was  one  of  the  numerous  counter- 
blasts to  Godwin's  anarchic  perfectibilism,  and  its  general  drift 
was  simply  to  show  that  the  increase  of  population,  unless  counter- 
acted by  individual  and  moral  self-restraint,  must  reduce  humanity 
to  misery.  The  special  formula  that  "  population  increases  in  a 
geometrical,  food  in  a  arithmetical  ratio,"  is  overstrained  and  a 


380  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

little  absurd ;  the  general  principle  is  sound  beyond  all  question, 
and  not  only  consistent  with,  but  absolutely  deducible  from,  the 
purest  Christian  doctrines.  Malthus  wrote  well,  he  knew  thoroughly 
what  he  was  writing  about,  and  he  suffers  only  from  the  inevitable 
drawback  to  all  writers  on  such  subjects  who  have  not  positive 
genius  of  form,  that  a  time  comes  when  their  contentions  appear 
self-evident  to  all  who  are  not  ignorant  or  prejudiced. 

The  greatest  theological  interest  of  the  century  belongs  to  what 
is  diversely  called  the  Oxford  and  the  Tractarian  Movement ; 
while,  even  if  this  statement  be  challenged  on  non-literary  grounds, 
it  will  scarcely  be  so  by  any  one  on  grounds  literary.  For  the 
present  purpose,  of  course,  nothing  like  a  full  account  of  the 
Movement  can  be  attempted.  It  is  enough  to  say  that  it  arose 
partly  in  reaction  from  the  Evangelical  tendency  which  had 
dominated  the  more  active  section  of  the  Church  of  England 
for  many  years,  partly  in  protest  against  the  Liberalising  and 
Latitudinarian  tendency  in  matters  both  temporal  and  spiritual. 
In  contradistinction  to  its  predecessor  (for  the  Evangelicals  had 
been  the  reverse  of  literary),  it  was  from  the  first — i.e.  about  1830, 
or  earlier  if  we  take  The  Christian  Year  as  a  harbinger  of  it — a 
very  literary  movement  both  in  verse  and  prose.  Of  its  three 
leaders.  Pusey — whose  name,  given  to  it  in  derision  and  sometimes 
contested  by  sympathisers  as  unappropriate,  unquestionably  ranks  of 
right  as  that  of  its  greatest  theologian,  its  most  steadfast  character, 
and  the  most  of  a  born  leader  engaged  in  it — was  something 
less  of  a  pure  man  of  letters  than  either  Keble  or  Newman.  But 
he  was  a  man  of  letters ;  and  perhaps  a  greater  one  than  is 
usually  thought. 

Edward  Bouverie  Puscy,  who  belonged  to  the  family  of  Lord 
Folkestone  by  blood,  his  father  having  become  by  bequest  the 
representative  of  the  very  old  Berkshire  house  of  Pusey,  was 
born  at  the  seat  of  this  family  in  1800.  He  went  to  Eton  and  to 
Christ  Church,  and  became  a  fellow  of  Oriel,  studied  theology 
and  oriental  languages  in  Germany,  and  was  made  Professor  of 
Hebrew  at  the  early  age  of  twenty-seven.  He  was  a  thorough 


vin  PUSEY  381 

scholar,  and  even  in  the  times  of  his  greatest  unpopularity  no 
charge  of  want  of  competence  for  his  post  was  biought  against 
him  by  any  one  who  knew.  It  is,  however,  somewhat  comic 
that  charges  of  Rationalism  were  brought  against  his  first  book,  a 
study  of  contemporary  German  theology.  In  or  soon  after  1833 
he  joined  Newman  and  Keble  in  the  famous  Tracts  for  the  Times, 
at  the  same  time  urging  the  return  to  a  more  primitive  and 
catholic  theology  in  his  sermons,  and  by  means  of  the  great 
enterprise  in  translation  called  the  Oxford  Library  of  the  Fathers, 
of  which  he  executed  parts  and  sedulously  edited  others.  Pusey 
first  came  before  general  public  notice  outside  Oxford  in 
1843,  in  consequence  of  a  very  high-handed  exertion  of  power 
by  the  authorities  of  the  University,  who,  without  allowing  him 
a  hearing,  suspended  him,  for  a  sermon  on  the  Eucharist,  from 
preaching  for  three  years.  His  mouth  was  thus  closed  at  the 
very  moment  when  Newman  "  went  over " ;  and  when  some  of 
the  enemies  of  the  Movement  declared  that  Pusey  would  go 
too.  Others  were  equally  certain  that  if  he  stayed  it  was  either 
from  base  motives  of  self-interest,  or,  still  more  basely,  in  order 
to  do  underhand  damage  to  the  Church.  But  all  who  unite 
knowledge  and  fairness  now  admit,  not  only  his  perfect  loyalty, 
but  the  almost  unexampled  heroism  and  steadfastness  with  which 
for  some  ten  or  fifteen  years  after  Newman's  secession,  against 
popular  obloquy,  against  something  very  like  persecution  from  the 
authorities  of  the  Church  and  the  University,  and  against  the 
constant  and  repeated  discouragement  given  by  the  desertion  of 
friends  and  colleagues,  he  upheld  his  cause  and  made  the  despised 
and  reproached  "  Puseyites  "  of  his  middle  life  what  he  lived  to 
see  them — the  greatest  and  almost  the  dominant  party  in  the 
Anglican  Church.  He  was  less  fortunate  in  his  opposition  to 
the  secularising  of«  the  Universities,  and  in  his  attempts  (which 
ill-willers  did  not  fail  to  liken  to  the  attempts  made  to  stifle  his 
own  teaching)  to  check  by  legal  means  the  spread  of  Rationalism. 
But  he  was  nearly  as  full  of  honours  as  of  years  when  he  died  on 
1 6th  September  1882. 


382  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY 


Many  of  the  constituents  of  this  remarkable  and  perhaps 
unexampled  success — Pusey's  personal  saintliness,  his  unselfish  use 
of  his  considerable  income,  his  unwearied  benevolence  in  other 
than  pecuniary  ways — do  not  concern  us  here.  But  his  works, 
which  arc  numerous,  and  the  most  literary  of  which  are  his 
Sermons  and  his  Eirenicon,  contributed  not  a  little  to  it.  Pusey's 
style  was  accused  by  some  of  bareness  and  by  others  of  obscurity  ; 
but  these  accusations  may  be  safely  dismissed  as  due  merely  to 
the  prevalent  fancy  for  florid  expression,  and  to  the  impatience 
of  somewhat  scholastically  arranged  argument  which  has  also 
distinguished  our  times. 

The  second  of  this  remarkable  trio,  John  Keble,  was  the 
eldest,  having  been  born  on  24th  April  1792,  at  Fairford,  in 
Gloucestershire,  with  which  county  his  family  had  for  some 
centuries  been  connected.  Keble's  father  was  a  clergyman,  and 
there  was  a  clerical  feeling  and  tradition  in  the  whole  family. 
John  went  to  no  public  school,  but  was  very  carefully  educated 
at  home,  obtained  an  open  scholarship  at  Corpus  Christi  College, 
Oxford,  when  he  was  only  fourteen,  and  went  into  residence  next 
year— for  just  at  this  time  extremely  early  entrance  at  the  Uni- 
versity was  much  commoner  than  a  little  earlier  or  later.  He  had 
only  just  entered  his  nineteenth  year  when  he  took  a  double  first, 
and  had  not  concluded  it  when  he  was  elected,  at  the  same  time 
with  Whately,  to  an  Oriel  fellowship.  He  followed  this  up  by 
winning  both  the  Chancellor's  Essays,  English  and  Latin,  and 
established  his  reputation  as  the  most  brilliant  man  of  his  day.  He 
was  ordained  as  soon  as  he  could  be,  and  served  the  usual  offices 
of  tutor  in  his  College  and  examiner  in  the  University.  But  even 
such  semi-public  life  as  this  was  distasteful  to  him,  and  he  soon 
gave  up  his  Oriel  tutorship  for  a  country  curacy  and  private  pupils. 
Indeed  the  note,  some  would  say  the  fault,  of  Keble's  whole  life 
was  an  almost  morbid  retiringness,  which  made  him  in  1827  refuse 
even  to  compete  with  Hawkins  for  the  Provostship  of  Oriel.  It 
is  possible  that  he  would  not  have  been  elected,  for  oddly  enough 
his  two  future  colleagues  in  the  triumvirate,  both  Fellows,  were 


vin  KEBLE  383 

both  in  favour  of  his  rival ;  but  his  shunning  the  contest  has  been 
deeply  deplored,  and  by  some  even  blamed  as  a  gran  rifiuto.  The 
publication  of  The  Christian  Year,  however,  which  immediately 
followed,  probably  did  more  for  the  Movement  and  for  the 
spiritual  life  of  England  than  any  office-holding  could  have 
done  ;  and  in  1831,  Keble,  being  elected  Professor  of  Poetry, 
distinguished  himself  almost  as  much  in  criticism  as  he  had 
already  done  in  poetry.  He  obtained,  and  was  contented  with, 
the  living  of  Hursley,  in  Hampshire,  where  he  resided  till  his 
death  on  29th  March  1866. 

Keble's  very  .  generally  granted  character  as  one  of  the 
holiest  persons  of  modern  times,  and  even  his  influence  on 
the  Oxford  Movement,  concern  us  less  here  than  his  literary 
work,  which  was  of  almost  the  first  importance  merely  as 
literature.  The  reaction  from  an  enormous  popularity  of  nearly 
seventy  years'  date,  and  the  jjrowth  ji>f_anti- dogmatic  opinions, 
have  brought  about  a  sort  of  tendency  in  some  quarters  to 
belittle,  if  not  positively  to  sneer  at,  The  Christian  Year,  which, 
with  the  Lyra  Innocentium  and  a  collection  of  Miscellaneous 
Poems,  contains  Keble's  poetical  work.  There  never  was  any- 
thing more  uncritical.  The  famous  reference  which  Thackeray — 
the  least  ecclesiastically  inclined,  if  by  no  means  the  least  re- 
ligious, of  English  men  of  letters  of  genius  in  this  century — makes 
to  its  appearance  in  Pendennis,  shows  what  the  thoughts  of 
unbiassed  contemporaries  were.  And  no  very  different  judgment 
can  be  formed  by  unbiassed  posterity.  With  Herbert  and  Mis$ 
Rossetti,  Keble  ranks  as  the  greatest  of  English  writers  in  sacred 
verse,  the  irregular  and  unequal  efforts  of  Vaughan  and  Crashaw 
sometimes  transcending,  oftener  sinking  below  the  three.  If 
Keble  has  not  the  exquisite  poetical  mysticism  of  Christina 
Rossetti  he  is  more  copious  and  more  strictly  scholarly,  while 
he  escapes  the  quaint  triviality,  or  the  triviality  sometimes  not 
even  quaint,  which  mars  Herbert.  The  influence  of  Wordsworth 
is  strongly  shown,  but  it  is  rendered  and  redirected  in  an  entirely 
original  manner.  The  lack  of  taste  which  mars  so  much  religious 


384  PHILOSOPHY  AND  TIIEOLOC.Y 


poetry  never  shows  itself  even  for  a  moment  in  Keble ;  yet  the 
correctness  of  his  diction,  like  the  orthodoxy  of  his  thought,  is 
never  frigid  or  tame.  There  are  few  poets  who  so  well  deserve 
the  nickname  of  a  Christian  Horace,  though  the  phrase  may 
seem  to  have  something  of  the  paradox  of  "prose  Shakespeare." 
The  careful  melody  of  the  versification  and  the  exact  felicity  of 
the  diction  exclude,  it  may  be,  those  highest  flights  which  create 
most  enthusiasm,  at  any  rate  in  this  century.  But  for  measure, 
proportion,  successful  attainment  of  the  proposed  end,  Keble  has 
few  superiors. 

It  would  indeed  be  surprising  if  he  had  many,  for,  with  his 
gift  of  verse,  he  was  also  one  of  the  most  accomplished  of  critics. 
His  Prtzlectiones  Academics,  written,  as  the  rule  then  was,  in 
Latin,  is  unfortunately  a  sealed  book  to  too  many  persons  whom 
modern  practice  calls,  and  strives  to  consider,  "  educated  "  ;  but  he 
did  not  confine  himself  even  in  these  to  classical  subjects,  and  he 
wrote  not  a  few  reviews  in  English  dealing  with  modern  poetry. 
His  aesthetics  are  of  course  deeply  tinged  with  ethic  ;  but  he  does 
not  in  the  least  allow  moral  prepossessions  to  twist  his  poetic 
theory,  which  may  be  generally  described  as  the  Aristotelian 
teaching  on  the  subject,  supplied  and  assisted  by  the  aid  of  a 
wide  study  of  the  literatures  not  open  to  Aristotle.  There  can 
be  no  doubt  that  if  Keble's  mind  had  not  been  more  and  more 
absorbed  by  religious  subjects  he  would  have  been  one  of  the 
very  greatest  of  English  critics  of  literature  ;  and  he  is  not  far 
from  being  a  great  one  as  it  is.  He  did  not  publish  many 
sermons,  though  one  of  his,  the  Assize  Sermon  at  Oxford  in 
1833,  's  considered  to  have  started  the  Movement;  and  opinions 
as  to  his  pulpit  powers  have  varied.  Bat  it  is  certainly  not  too 
much  to  say  that  it  was  impossible  for  Keble  not  to  make  every- 
thing that  he  wrote,  whether  in  verse  or  prose,  literature  of  the 
most  perfect  academic  kind,  informed  by  the  spirit  of  scholarship 
and  strengthened  by  individual  talent. 

John  Henry  Newman  was  the  eldest  son  of  a  man  of  business 
of  some  means  (who  came  of  a  family  of  Cambridgeshire  yeomen) 


vni  NEWMAN  385 

and  of  a  lady  of  Huguenot  descent.  He  was  born  in  London 
on  2ist  February  1801,  was  educated  privately  at  Baling, 
imbibed  strong  evangelical  principles,  and  went  up  to  Oxford 
(Trinity  College)  so  early  that  he  went  in  for  "  Greats  "  (in  which 
he  only  obtained  a  third  class)  before  he  was  nineteen.  He  con- 
tinued, however,  to  reside  at  Trinity,  where  he  held  a  scholarship, 
and  more  than  made  up  for  his  mishap  in  the  schools  by  winning 
an  Oriel  fellowship  in  1823.  In  three  successive  years  he  took 
orders  and  a  curacy  in  the  first,  the  Vice-Principalship  of  St. 
Alban's  Hall  under  Whately  in  the  second,  and  an  Oriel  tutor- 
ship in  the  third;  while  in  1827  he  succeeded  Hawkins,  who 
became  Provost,  in  the  vicarage  of  St.  Mary's,  the  most  important 
post  of  the  kind — to  a  man  who  chose  to  make  it  important — in 
Oxford. 

Newman  did  so  choose,  and  his  sermons — not  those  to  the 
University,  though  these  also  are  notable,  but  those  nominally 
"  Parochial,"  really  addressed  to  the  undergraduates  who  soon  flocked 
to  hear  him — were  the  foundation  and  mainstay  of  his  influence, 
constitute  the  largest  single  division  of  his  printed  work,  and  perhaps 
present  that  work  in  the  best  and  fairest  light.  His  history  for  the 
next  sixteen  years  cannot  be  attempted  here ;  it  is  the  history  of 
the  famous  thing  called  the  Oxford  Movement,  which  changed  the 
intellectual  as  well  as  the  ecclesiastical  face  of  England,  on  which 
libraries  have  been  written,  and  which,  even  yet,  has  not  been 
satisfactorily  or  finally  judged.  His  travels  with  Hurrell  Froude 
in  the  Mediterranean  during  1832-1833  seem  to  have  been  the 
special  turning-point  of  his  career.  After  ten  years,  perhaps  of 
"development,"  certainly  of  hard  fighting,  he  resigned  St.  Mary's 
in  1843,  and  after  two  years  more  of  halting  between  two 
opinions  he  was  received  into  the  Church  of  Rome  in  October 
1845.  He  left  Oxford,  never  to  return  to  it  as  a  residence,  and 
not  to  visit  it  for  thirty-two  years,  in  the  following  February. 

His  first  public  appearance  after  this  was  in  the  once  famous 
Achilli  trial  for  libel,  in  which  the  plaintiff,  an  anti-Roman 
lecturer,  recovered  damages  from  Newman  for  an  utterly  damning 


386  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

description  of  Achilli's  career  in  the  Roman  Church  itself. 
Impartial  judges  generally  thought  and  think  that  the  verdict 
was  against  the  weight  of  evidence.  At  any  rate  it  produced 
a  decided  revulsion  in  Newman's  favour,  of  which  he  was  both 
too  convinced  of  his  own  position  and  too  astute  not  to  take 
advantage.  He  had  hitherto  since  his  secession  resided  (he  had 
been  re-ordained  in  Rome)  at  Birmingham,  London,  and  Dublin, 
but  he  now  took  up  his  abode,  practically  for  the  rest  of  his  life,  at 
Birmingham,  or  rather  Edgbaston.  In  1864  the  great  opportunity, 
presented  by  Kingsley's  unguarded  words  (vide  supra),  occurred, 
and  he  availed  himself  of  it  at  once.  Most  of  those  who  read 
the  Apologia  pro  Vita  Sud  were  not  familiar  with  Newman's 
masterly  English,  and  his  competent,  if  not  supreme,  dialectic 
and  sophistic.  They  were  not,  as  a  former  generation  had  been, 
prejudiced  against  him  ;  the  untiring  work  of  those  of  his  former 
friends  who  remained  faithful  to  the  Church  of  England  had  of 
itself  secured  him  a  fair  hearing.  During  the  remaining  twenty- 
five  years  of  his  life  he  had  never  again  to  complain  of  ostracism 
or  unfair  prejudice.  The  controversy  as  to  the  Vatican  Council 
brought  him  once  more  forward,  and  into  collision  with  Mr. 
Gladstone,  but  into  no  odium  of  any  kind.  Indeed  he  was  con- 
siderably less  popular  at  Rome  than  at  home,  the  more  supple 
and  less  English  character  of  Manning  finding  greater  favour 
with  Pius  IX.  The  late  seventies,  however,  were  a  time  of 
triumph  for  Newman.  In  1877  he  was  elected  an  Honorary 
Fellow  of  his  own  College  (Trinity),  and  next  year  paid  what  may 
be  called  a  visit  of  restoration  to  Oxford,  while  in  1879  t^6  new 
Pope,  Leo  XIII.,  a  man  of  great  abilities  and  wide  piety,  raised 
Newman  to  the  cardinalate.  He  visited  Rome  on  the  occasion, 
but  returned  to  Birmingham,  where  the  Edgbaston  Oratory  was 
still  his  home  for  the  remaining  years  of  his  life.  This  did  not 
end  till  nth  August  1890,  when  almost  all  men  spoke  almost  all 
good  things  over  his  grave,  though  some  did  not  spare  to  inter- 
pose a  sober  criticism.  The  books  composed  during  this  long 
and  eventful  career,  especially  in  the  first  half  of  it,  were  very 


vin  NEWMAN  387 

numerous,  Cardinal  Newman's  works  at  the  time  of  his  death, 
and  before  the  addition  of  Letters,  etc.,  extending  to  nearly  forty 
volumes.  Much  of  the  matter  of  these  is  still  finis  dolosissimus, 
not  to  be  trodden  on  save  in  the  most  gingerly  manner  in  such  a 
book  as  this.  Yet  there  are  probably  few  qualified  and  impartial 
judges  who  would  refuse  Newman,  all  things  considered,  the 
title  of  the  greatest  theological  writer  in  English  during  this 
century;  and  there  are  some  who  uphold  him  for  one  of  the 
very  greatest  of  English  prose  writers.  It  is  therefore  impossible 
not  to  give  him  a  place,  and  no  mean  place,  here. 

Although  his  chief  work,  indeed  all  but  a  very  small  part 
of  it,  was  in  prose,  he  was  a  good  verse-writer.  The  beautiful 
poem  or  hymn,  usually  called  from  its  first  words  "  Lead, 
kindly  Light,"  but  entitled  by  its  author  "The  Pillar  of  Cloud," 
is  not  merely  as  widely  known  as  any  piece  of  sacred  verse 
written  during  the  century,  but  may  challenge  anything  of  that 
class  (out  of  the  work  of  Miss  Christina  Rossetti)  for  really 
poetical  decoction  and  concoction  of  religious  ideas.  It  was 
written,  with  much  else,  during  a  voyage  in  a  sailing  ship  from 
Sicily  to  Marseilles  at  the  close  (June  1833)  of  that  continental 
tour  which  was  of  such  moment  in  Newman's  life ;  and  the 
whole  batch  ferments  with  spiritual  excitement.  Earlier,  and 
indeed  later,  Newman,  besides  plenty  of  serious  verse,  con- 
tributed to  the  Lyra  Apostolica  or  written  independently,  was  a 
graceful  writer  of  verse  trifles ;  but  his  largest  and  best  poetical 
work,  The  Dream  of  Gerontius,  was  not  produced  till  he  was 
approaching  old  age,  and  had  long  passed  the  crisis  of  his 
career.  Possibly  the  new  ferment  of  soul  into  which  the  com- 
position of  the  Apologia  had  thrown  him,  may  have  been 
responsible  for  this,  which  is  dated  a  year  later.  It  is  the  recital 
in  lyrical-dramatic  form  of  an  anticipatory  vision,  just  before  death, 
of  the  Last  Things,  and  unites,  dignity  and  melody  in  a  remarkable 
manner.  The  only  other  parts  of  his  work  to  which  Newman 
himself  attached  the  title  "  literature "  were  the  prose  romances 
of  Callista  and  Loss  and  Gain.  They  display  his  power  over 


388  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

language,  but  are  exposed  on  one  side  to  the  charges  usually 
incurred  by  novels  with  a  purpose,  and  on  the  other  to  a 
suspicion  of  bad  taste,  incurred  in  the  effort  to  be  popular. 

By  far  the  larger  bulk  of  the  works,  however,  belongs  to 
theology.  This  includes  twelve  volumes  of  Sermons,  all  but  a 
small  part  delivered  before  Newman's  change  of  creed,  and  eight 
of  them  the  Parochial  and  Plain  Sermons,  preached  in  the  pulpit 
of  St.  Mary's,  but  not  to  the  University;  four  of  treatises,  including 
the  most  famous  and  characteristic  of  Newman's  works  except 
the  Apologia,  The  Grammar  of  Assent,  and  The  Development  of 
Christian  Doctrine  ;  four  of  Essays  ;  three  of  Historical  Sketches  ; 
four  theological,  chiefly  on  Arianism,  and  translations  of  St. 
Athanasius  ;  and  six  Polemical,  which  culminate  in  the  Apologia. 
With  respect  to  the  substance  of  this  work  it  is  soon  easy,  putting 
controversial  matters  as  much  as  possible  apart,  to  discover  where 
Newman's  strength  and  weakness  respectively  lay.  He  was 
distinctly  deficient  in  the  historic  sense  ;  and  in  the  Apologia 
itself  he  threw  curious  light  on  this  deficiency,  and  startled  even 
friends  and  fellow-converts,  by  speaking  contemptuously  of  "  anti- 
quarian arguments."  The  same  defect  is  quaintly  illustrated  by 
a  naif  and  evidently  sincere  complaint  that  he  should  have  been 
complained  of  for  (in  his  own  words)  "  attributing  to  the  middle 
of  the  third  century  what  is  certainly  to  be  found  in  the  fourth." 
And  it  is  understood  that  he  was  not  regarded  either  by  Anglican 
or  by  Roman  Catholic  experts  as  a  very  deep  theologian  in  either 
of  his  stages.  The  special  characteristic — the  ethos  as  his  own 
contemporaries  and  immediate  successors  at  Oxford  would  have 
said— of  Newman  seems  to  have  been  strangely  combined.  He 
was  perhaps  the  last  of  the  very  great  preachers  in  English — of 
those  who  combined  a  thoroughly  classical  training,  a  scholarly 
form,  with  the  incommunicable  and  almost  inexplicable  power  to 
move  audiences  and  readers.  And  he  was  one  of  the  first  of  that 
class  of  journalists  who  in  the  new  age  have  succeeded  the 
preachers,  whether  for  good  or  ill,  as  the  prophets  of  the  illiterate. 
It  may  seem  strange  to  speak  of  Newman  as  a  journalist ;  but  if 


NEWMAN  389 


any  one  will  read  his  essays,  his  Apologia,  above  all  the  curious  set 
of  articles  called  The  Tamworth  Reading-Room,  he  will  see  what  a 
journalist  was  lost,  or  only  partly  developed,  in  this  cardinal.  He 
had  the  conviction,  which  is  far  more  necessary  to  a  journalist 
than  is  generally  thought ;  and  yet  his  convictions  were  not  of 
that  extremely  systematic  and  far-reaching  kind  which  no  doubt 
often  stands  in  the  journalist's  way.  _He  had  the  faculty  of  mixing 
bad  and  good  argument,  which  is  far  more  effective  with  mixed 
audiences  than  unbated  logic.  And,  little  as  he  is  thought  of  as 
sympathising  with  the  common  people,  he  was  entirely  free  from 
that  contempt  of  them  which  always  prevents  a  man  from  gaining 
their  ear  unless  he  is  a  consummately  clever  scoundrel. 

It  may  however  be  retorted  that  if  Newman  was  a  born 
journalist,  sermons  and  theology  must  be  a  much  better  school 
of  style  in  journalism  than  articles  and  politics.  And  it  is  quite 
true  that  his  writing  at  its  best  is  of  extraordinary  charm,  while 
that  charm  is  not,  as  in  the  case  of  some  of  his  contemporaries 
and  successors,  derived  from  dubiously  legitimate  ornament  and 
flourish,  but  observes  the  purest  classical  limitations  of  proportion 
and  form.  It  has  perhaps  sometimes  been  a  little  overvalued, 
either  by  those  who  in  this  way  or  that— out  of  love  for  what  he 
joined  or  hate  to  what  he  left— were  in  uncritical  sympathy  with 
Newman,  or  by  others,  it  may  be,  from  pure  ignorance  of  the  fact 
that  much  of  this  charm  is  the  common  property  of  the  more 
scholarly  writers  of  the  time,  and  is  only  eminently,  not  specially, 
present  in  him.  But  of  the  fact  of  it  there  is  no  doubt.  In  such 
a  sermon,  for  instance,  as  that  on  "  The  Individuality  of  the  Soul," 
a  thought  or  series  of  thoughts,  in  itself  poetically  grandiose 
enough  for  Taylor  or  even  for  Donne,  is  presented  in  the  simplest 
but  in  the  most  marvellously  impressive  language.  The  sentences 
are  neither  volleying  in  their  shortness,  nor  do  they  roll 
thundrously ;  the  cadences  though  perfect  are  not  engineered 
with  elaborate  musical  art ;  there  are  in  proportion  very  few 
adjectives ;  the  writer  exercises  the  most  extreme  continence  in 
metaphor,  simile,  illustration,  all  the  tricks  and  frounces  of  literary 


390  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

art.  Yet  Taylor,  though  he  might  have  attained  more  sweetness 
or  more  grandeur,  could  hardly  have  been  more  beautiful ;  and 
though  Donne  might  have  been  so,  it  would  have  been  at  the 
expense  of  clearness.  Newman  is  so  clear  that  he  has  often  been 
accused  of  being,  and  sometimes  is,  a  little  hard ;  but  this  is  not 
always  or  often  the  case :  it  is  especially  not  so  when  he  is 
dealing  with  things  which,  as  in  the  sermon  just  referred  to  and 
that  other  on  "The  Intermediate  State,"  admit  the  diffusion  of 
religious  awe.  The  presence  of  that  awe,  and  of  a  constant  sense 
and  dread  of  Sin,  have  been  said,  and  probably  with  truth,  to  be 
keynotes  of  Newman's  religious  ideas,  and  of  his  religious  history  ; 
but  they  did  not  harden,  as  in  thinkers  of  another  temper  has 
often  been  the  case,  his  style  or  his  thought.  On  the  contrary, 
they  softened  both ;  and  it  is  when  he  is  least  under  the  influence 
of  them  that  unction  chiefly  deserts  him.  Yet  he  by  no  means 
often  sought  to  excite  his  hearers.  He  held,  as  he  himself  some- 
where says,  that  "impassioned  thoughts  and  sublime  imaginings 
have  no  strength  in  them."  And  this  conviction  of  his  can  hardly 
be  strange  to  the  fact  that  few  writers  indulge  so  little  as  Newman 
in  what  is  called  fine  writing.  He  has  "  organ  passages,"  but 
they  are  such  as  the  wind  blowing  as  it  lists  draws  from  him,  not 
such  as  are  produced  by  deliberate  playing  on  himself. 

In  a  wider  space  it  would  be  interesting  to  comment  on 
numerous  other  exponents  of  the  Movement.  Archdeacon 
afterwards  Cardinal  Manning  (1808-93),  the  successful  rival  of 
Newman  among  those  Anglican  clergymen  who  joined  the 
Church  of  Rome,  was  less  a  man  of  letters  than  a  very  astute 
man  of  business ;  but  his  sermons  before  he  left  the  Church  had 
merit,  and  he  afterwards  wrote  a  good  deal.  Richard  Hurrell 
Froude  (1803-36),  elder  brother  of  the  historian,  had  a  very 
great  and  not  perhaps  a  very  beneficent  influence  on  Newman, 
and  through  Newman  on  others ;  but  he  died  too  soon  to  leave 
much  work.  His  chief  distinguishing  note  was  a  vigorous  and 
daring  humour  allied  to  a  strong  reactionary  sentiment.  Isaac 
Williams,  the  second  poet  of  the  Movement  (1802-65)  was  in 


VIM  MINOR  TRACTARIANS  391 

most  respects,  as  well  as  in  poetry,  a  minor  Kehle.  W.  G. 
Ward,  commonly  called  "  Ideal "  Ward  from  his  famous,  very 
ill-written,  very  ill-digested,  but  important  Ideal  of  a  Christian 
Church,  which  was  the  alarm-bell  for  the  flight  to  Rome,  was  a 
curiously  constituted  person  of  whom  something  has  been  said  in 
reference  to  Clough.  He  had  little  connection  with  pure  letters, 
and  after  his  secession  to  Rome  and  his  succession  to  a  large 
fortune  he  finally  devoted  himself  to  metaphysics  of  a  kind. 
His  acuteness  was  great,  and  he  had  a  scholastic  subtlety  and 
logical  deftness  which  made  him  very  formidable  to  the  loose 
thinkers  and  reasoners  of  Utilitarianism  and  anti-Supernaturalism. 
One  of  the  latest  important  survivors  was  Dean  Church  (1815-91), 
who,  as  Proctor,  had  arrested  the  persecution  of  the  Tractarians, 
with  which  it  was  sought  to  complete  the  condemnation  of 
Ward's  Ideal,  and  who  afterwards,  both  in  a  country  cure  and 
as  Dean  of  St.  Paul's,  acquired  very  high  literary  rank  by  work 
on  Dante,  Anselm,  Spenser,  and  other  subjects,  leaving  also 
the  best,  though  unfortunately  an  incomplete,  history  of  the 
Movement  itself;  while  the  two  Mozleys,  the  one  a  considerable 
theologian,  the  other  an  active  journalist,  brothers-in-law  of 
Newman,  also  deserve  mention.  Last  of  all  perhaps  we  must 
notice  Henry  Parry  Liddon  (1829-90),  of  a  younger  generation, 
but  the  right-hand  man  of  Pusey  in  his  later  day,  and  his 
biographer  afterwards — a  popular  and  pleasing,  though  rather 
rhetorical  than  argumentative  or  original,  preacher,  and  a  man 
very  much  affected  by  his  friends.  Even  this  list  is  nothing  like 
complete,  but  it  is  impossible  to  enlarge  it. 

Midway  between  the  Movement  and  its  enemies,  a  partial 
sympathiser  in  early  days,  almost  an  enemy  when  the  popular 
tide  turned  against  it,  almost  a  leader  when  public  favour  once 
more  set  in  in  its  favour,  was  Samuel  Wilberforce,  Bishop  of  Oxford 
and  Winchester  (1805-73).  The  third  son  of  the  celebrated 
emancipationist  and  evangelical,  he  had  brothers  who  were  more 
attracted  than  himself  by  the  centripetal  force  of  Roman  doctrine, 
and  succumbed  to  it.  Worldly  perhaps  as  much  as  spiritual 


392  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAK 

motives  kept  him  steadier.  He  did  invaluable  work  as  a 
bishop ;  and  at  all  times  of  his  life  he  was  in  literature  a  distinct 
supporter  of  the  High  Church  cause,  though  with  declensions 
and  defections  of  Erastian  and  evangelical  backsliding.  He  was 
a  very  admirable  preacher,  though  his  sermons  do  not  read  as 
well  as  they  "  heard " ;  some  of  his  devotional  manuals  are 
of  great  excellence ;  and  in  the  heyday  of  High  Church  allegory 
(an  interesting  by-walk  of  literature  which  can  only  be  glanced 
at  here,  but  which  was  trodden  by  some  estimable  and  even 
some  eminent  writers)  he  produced  the  well  hit-off  tale  of  Agathos 
(1839).  But  it  may  be  that  he  will,  as  a  writer,  chiefly  survive  in 
the  remarkable  letters  and  diaries  in  his  Life,  which  are  not  only 
most  valuable  for  the  political  and  ecclesiastical  history  of  the 
time,  but  precious  always  as  human  documents  and  sometimes 
as  literary  compositions. 

Three  remarkable  persons  must  be  mentioned  among  the 
opponents  of  (and  in  one  case  harsh  judgment  might  say  the 
deserters  of)  the  Movement.  These  were  Arthur  Penrhyn 
Stanley,  Mark  Pattison,  and  Benjamin  Jowett.  Stanley,  born  in 
1815,  was  the  son  of  the  (afterwards)  Bishop  of  Norwich  and  a 
nephew  of  the  first  Lord  Stanley  of  Alderley,  and  was  brought  up 
very  much  under  the  influence  of  Arnold,  whose  biographer  he 
became.  But  he  went  further  than  Arnold  in  Broad  Church 
ways.  His  career  at  Rugby  and  at  Oxford  was  distinguished, 
and  after  being  fellow  and  tutor  of  University  College  for  some 
ten  years,  he  became  successively  Canon  of  Canterbury,  Canon  of 
Christ  Church  and  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History  at  Oxford, 
and  Dean  of  Westminster,  in  which  last  post  he  had  almost 
greater  opportunities  than  any  bishop,  and  used  them  to  the  full. 
He  also  wrote  busily,  devoting  himself  especially  to  the  geo- 
graphy of  Palestine  and  the  history  of  the  Eastern  Church,  which 
he  handled  in  a  florid  and  popular  style,  though  not  with  much 
accuracy  or  scholarship.  Personally,  Stanley  was  much  liked, 
though  his  conception  of  his  duties  as  a  sworn  servant  of  the 
Church  has  seemed  strange  to  some.  He  died  in  July  188' 


MARK  PATTISON  393 


Mark  Pattison  (1813-84),  Fellow  and  Rector  of  Lincoln 
College,  had  a  less  amiable  character  than  Stanley's,  but  a 
greater  intellect  and  far  nicer,  profounder,  and  wider  scholarship, 
though  he  actually  did  very  little.  He  fell  under  the  influence 
of  Newman  early,  and  was  one  of  that  leader's  closest  associates 
in  his  monastic  retreat  at  Littlemore.  But  when  Newman  "  went 
over,"  the  wave  swept  Pattison  neither  to  Rome  nor  safely  on  to 
higher  English  ground,  but  intp  a  religious  scepticism,  the  exact 
extent  of  which  was  nowhere  definitely  announced,  but  which 
was  regarded  by  some  as  nearly  total.  He  did  not  nominally 
leave  the  Church,  but  he  acted  always  with  the  extreme  Liberal 
party  in  the  University,  and  he  was  one  of  the  famous  Seven  who 
contributed  to  Essays  and  Reviews}  The  shock  of  his  religious 
revolution  was  completed  by  a  secular  disappointment  —  his 
defeat  for  the  office  of  Rector,  which  he  actually  attained  much 
later ;  and  a  temper  always  morbid,  appears,  to  judge  from  his 
painful  but  extraordinarily  interesting  and  characteristic  Memoirs, 
to  have  been  permanently  soured.  Even  active  study  became 
difficult  to  him,  and  though  he  was  understood  to  have  a  more 
extensive  acquaintance  with  the  humanists  of  the  late  Renaissance 
than  any  man  of  his  day,  his  knowledge  took  little  written  form 
except  a  volume  on  Isaac  Casaubon.  He  also  wrote  an  admirable 
little  book  on  Milton  for  the  English  Men  of  Letters,  edited 
parts  of  Milton  and  Pope,  and  contributed  a  not  inconsiderable 
number  of  essays  and  articles  to  the  Quarterly  and  Saturday 
Reviews,  and  other  papers.  The  autobiography  mentioned  was 
published  after  his  death. 

Despite  Pattison's  peculiar  temper  he  had  warm  and  devoted 
friends,  and  it  was  impossible  for  any  one,  whether  person- 
ally liking  him  or  not,  to  deny  him  the  possession  of  most 
unusual  gifts.  Whether  his  small  performance  was  due  to  the 

J  This  famous  book,  published  in  1860,  was  a  collection  of  papers  by  six 
clergymen  and  a  layman,  some  of  which  undoubtedly  were,  and  the  rest  of  which 
were  by  association  thought  to  be,  unorthodox.  It  was  condemned  by  Convoca- 
tion, and  actual  legal  proceedings  were  taken  against  Uso  of  the  writers,  but 
without  final  effect. 


394  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

shocks  just  referred  to,  to  genuine  fastidiousness  and  resolve  to 
do  nothing  but  the  best,  or  to  these  things  mixed  with  a  strong 
dash  of  downright  indolence  and  want  of  energy,  is  hard  to  say. 
But  it  would  be  entirely  unjust  to  regard  him  as  merely  a  man 
who  was  "going  to  do  something."  His  actual  work  though  not 
large  is  admirable,  and  his  style  is  the  perfection  of  academic 
correctness,  not  destitute  of  either  vigour  or  grace. 

There  were  some  resemblances  between  Pattison  and  Jowett 
(1817-94);  but  the  latter,  unlike  Pattison,  had  never  had  any 
sympathies  with  the  religious  renaissance  of  his  time.  Like 
Pattison  he  passed  his  entire  life  (after  he  obtained  a  Balliol 
fellowship)  in  his  College,  and  like  him  became  head  of  it ;  while 
he  was  a  much  more  prominent  member  of  the  Liberal  party  in 
Oxford.  His  position  as  Regius  Professor  of  Greek  gave  him 
considerable  influence  even  beyond  Balliol.  He,  too,  was  an 
Essayist  and  Reviewer^  and  he  exercised  a  quiet  but  pervading 
influence  in  University  matters.  He  even  acquired  no  mean 
name  in  literature,  though  his  work,  after  an  early  Commentary 
on  some  Epistles  of  St.  Paul,  was  almost  entirely  confined  to 
translations,  especially  of  Plato,  and  though  in  these  translations 
he  was  much  assisted  by  pupils.  He  wrote  well,  but  with  much 
less  distinction  and  elegance  than  Pattison,  nor  had  he  by  any 
means  the  same  taste  for  literature  and  erudition  in  it.  But,  as 
an  influence  on  the  class  of  persons  from  whom  men  of  letters 
are  drawn,  no  one  has  exceeded  him  in  his  day. 

The  dramatic  catastrophe  of  the  Disruption  of  the  Scotch 
Kirk,  which,  by  a  strange  coincidence,  was  nearly  contemporary 
with  the  crisis  of  the  Oxford  Movement,  set  the  final  seal  upon 
the  reputation  of  Thomas  Chalmers,  who  headed  the  seceders. 
But  this  reputation  had  been  made  long  before,  and  indeed 
Chalmers  died  3oth  May  1847,  only  four  years  after  he  "went 
out."  He  was  a  much  older  man  than  the  Oxford  leaders,  having 
been  born  in  1780,  and  after  having  for  some  years,  though  a 
minister,  devoted  himself  chiefly  to  secular  studies,  he  became- 
famous  as  a  preacher  at  the  Tron  Church,  Glasgow.  In  1823 


vjii  CHALMERS— IRVING  395 

he  was  appointed  Professor  of  Moral  Philosophy  at  St.  Andrews, 
and  (shortly  afterwards)  of  Theology  in  Edinburgh.  He  was  one 
of  the  Bridgewater  treatise  writers — a  group  of  distinguished 
persons  endowed  to  produce  tractates  on  Natural  Theology — and 
his  work,  The  Adaptation  of  External  Nature  to  the  Moral  and 
Intellectual  Constitution  of  Man,  was  one  of  the  most  famous  of 
that  set,  procuring  for  him  a  correspondence -membership  from 
the  French  Institute  and  a  D.C.L.  from  Oxford.  Chalmers's 
works  are  extremely  voluminous  ;  the  testimony  as  to  the  effect 
of  his  preaching  is  tolerably  uniform ;  he  was  a  man  of  very 
wide  range  of  thought,  and  of  remarkable  faculty  of  popular- 
isation ;  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  he  was  a  born  leader  of  men. 
But  as  literature  his  works  have  hardly  maintained  the  reputa- 
tion which  they  once  had,  and  even  those  who  revere  him, 
unless  they  let  reverence  stifle  criticism,  are  apt  to  acknowledge 
that  there  is  more  rhetoric  than  logic  in  him,  and  that  the  rhetoric 
itself  is  not  of  the  finest. 

Edward  Irving,  at  one  time  an  assistant  to  Chalmers,  and  an 
early  friend  of  Carlyle,  was  twelve  years  the  junior  of  Chalmers 
himself,  and  died  thirteen  years  before  him.  But  at  nearly  the 
time  when  Chalmers  was  at  the  height  of  his  reputation  as  a 
preacher  in  Glasgow,  Irving  was  drawing  crowds  to  the  unfashion- 
able quarter  of  Hatton  Garden,  London,  by  sermons  of  extra- 
ordinary brilliancy.  Later  he  developed  eccentricities  of  doctrine 
which  do  not  concern  us,  and  his  preaching  has  not  worn  much 
better  than  that  of  his  old  superior.  Irving,  however,  had  more 
strictly  literary  affinities  than  Chalmers ;  he  came  under  the 
influence  of  Coleridge  (which  probably  had  not  a  little  to  do  both 
with  his  eloquence  and  with  his  vagaries);  and  he  may  be  regarded 
;is  having  been  much  more  of  a  man  of  letters  who  had  lost  his 
way  and  strayed  into  theology  than  as  a  theologian  proper. 

To  what  extent  this  great  and  famous  influence  of  Coleridge 
actually  worked  upon  Frederick  Denison  Maurice  has  been 
debated.  It  is  however  generally  stated  that  he,  like  his  friend 
Sterling,  was  induced  to  take  orders  in  the  Church  of  England  by 


396  PHILOSOPHY  AND  THEOLOGY  CHAP. 

this  influence.  He  was  not  a  very  young  man  when  in  1834,  the 
year  of  Irving's  death,  he  did  this,  for  he  had  been  born  in  1805, 
and  had  been  educated  at  Cambridge,  though  being  then  a  Uni- 
tarian he  did  not  take  a  degree.  He  afterwards  went  to  Oxford 
and  took  an  M.A.  degree  there,  and  he  was  regarded  for  a  time 
as  a  sort  of  outlying  sympathiser  with  the  Tractarian  Movement. 
But  his  opinions  took  a  very  different  line  of  development  not 
merely  from  those  of  Newman,  but  from  those  of  Keble  and 
Pusey.  He  indeed  never  left  the  Church,  in  which  he  held 
divers  preferments ;  and  though  his  views  on  eternal  punishment 
lost  him  a  professorship  in  King's  College,  London,  he  met  with 
no  formal  ecclesiastical  censure.  But  he  came  to  be  regarded  as 
a  champion  of  the  Broad  Church  school,  and  upheld  eloquently 
and  vehemently,  if  not  always  with  a  sufficiency  either  of  logic  or 
of  learning,  a  curious  conglomerate  of  "  advanced  "  views,  ranging 
from  Christian  Socialism  to  something  like  the  views  of  the  Atone- 
ment attributed  to  Origen,  and  from  deprecation  of  dogma  to 
deprecation  of  the  then  fashionable  political  economy.  He  was 
made  Professor  of  Moral  Philosophy  at  Cambridge  in  1866,  and 
died  in  1872.  Maurice's  sermons  were  effective,  and  his  other 
works  numerous.  A  very  generous  and  amiable  person  with  a 
deficient  sense  of  history,  Maurice  in  his  writing  is  a  sort  of 
elder,  less  gifted,  and  more  exclusively  theological  Charles 
Kingsley,  on  whom  he  exercised  great  and  rather  unfortunate 
influence.  But  his  looseness  of  thought,  wayward  eclecticism 
of  system,  and  want  of  accurate  learning,  were  not  remedied 
by  Kingsley's  splendid  pictorial  faculty,  his  creative  imagination, 
or  his  brilliant  style. 

Somewhat  akin  to  Maurice,  but  of  a  more  feminine  and  less 
robust  temperament,  was  Frederick  Robertson,  generally  called 
"  Robertson  of  Brighton,"  from  the  place  of  his  last  cure.  Robert- 
son, who  was  the  son  of  a  soldier,  was  born  in  London  on  3rd 
February  181 6.  After  a  very  eccentric  education  and  some  vacil- 
lations about  a  profession,  he  went,  rather  late,  to  Oxford,  and  was 
ordained  in  1840.  He  had  very  bad  health,  but  did  duty,  chiefly  at 


nil  MINOR  THEOLOGIANS  397 

Cheltenham  and  at  Brighton,  pretty  valiantly,  and  died  on  August 
1853.  He  published  next  to  nothing  in  his  lifetime,  but  after  his 
death  there  appeared  several  volumes  of  sermons  which  gained  great 
popularity,  and  were  followed  by  other  posthumous  works.  Robert- 
son's preaching  is  not  very  easy  to  judge,  because  the  published 
sermons  are  admittedly  not  what  was  actually  delivered,  but  after- 
reminiscences  or  summaries,  and  the  judgment  is  not  rendered 
easier  by  the  injudicious  and  gushing  laudation  of  which  he  has 
been  made  the  subject.  He  certainly  possessed  a  happy  gift  of 
phrase  now  and  then,  and  remarkable  earnestness. 

NOTE. — In  no  chapter,  perhaps,  has  there  been  greater  difficulty  as  to  in- 
clusion and  exclusion  than  in  the  present.  The  names  of  Bishop  Christopher 
Wordsworth,  of  Dean  Alford,  of  Bishop  Lightfoot  for  England,  of  Bishop 
Charles  Wordsworth,  of  Dean  Ramsay,  of  Drs.  Candlish,  Guthrie,  and  Macleod 
for  Scotland,  may  seem  to  clamour  among  orthodox  theologians,  those  of  W. 
R.  Greg,  of  James  Hinton,  of  W.  K.  Clifford  among  not  always  orthodox  lay 
dealers  with  the  problems  of  philosophy,  or  of  theology,  or  both.  With  less 
tyrannous  limits  of  space  Principal  Tulloch,  who  was  noteworthy  in  both  these 
and  in  pure  literature  as  well  (he  was  the  last  editor  of  Fraser],  must  have 
received  at  least  brief  notice  in  this  chapter,  as  must  his  brother  Principal,  J.  C. 
Shairp  (an  amiable  poet,  an  agreeable  critic,  and  Professor  of  Poetry  at  Oxford), 
in  others.  But  two  who  have  passed  away  more  recently  (1901)  deserve  a  little 
further  mention.  Francis  William  Newman,  younger  brother  of  the  Cardinal, 
who,  born  in  1805,  died  in  1897,  was  a  strange  contrast  to  his  brother  in  all  but 
ability,  being  flighty  and  "off  the  centre"  in  everything  that  he  touched — 
scholarship,  religion,  politics,  and  the  rest.  Henry  Sidgwick,  born  in  1838, 
long  held  the  Professorship  of  Moral  Philosophy  at  Cambridge,  and  only  resigned 
it  a  little  before  his  death  in  1900.  Mr.  Sidgwick's  chief  works  were  The  Methods 
of  Ethics  (1874),  and  The  Elements  of  Politics  (1891),  and  between  these  two 
sciences  his  interests  may  be  said  chiefly  to  have  lain.  Very  wide  knowledge, 
great  acuteness,  and  a  singular  fairness  of  mind  were  in  him  chequered  only  by 
a  sort  of  counterpart  or  exaggeration  of  the  last-named  quality,  which  seemed  to 
make  it  impossible  for  him  to  take  a  side  and  strike  out  for  it  against  all  comers. 


CHAPTER    IX 

LATER    JOURNALISM    AND   CRITICISM    IN    ART   AND    LETTERS 

IN  a  former  chapter  we  conducted  the  history  of  criticism, 
especially  literary  criticism,  and  that  chiefly  as  displayed  in  the 
periodicals  which  were  reorganised  and  refreshed  in  the  early 
years  of  the  century,  to  about  1850.  We  have  now  to  take 
it  up  at  that  point  and  conduct  it — subject  to  the  limitations  of 
our  plan,  which  have  become,  unfortunately,  of  less  importance 
than  they  were  when  this  book  first  appeared — to  the  close  of 
the  century.  We  shall  have  to  consider  the  rise  and  per- 
formances of  two  great  individual  writers,  one  of  whom  entirely 
recreated,  if  he  may  not  almost  be  said  to  have  created,  the 
criticism  of  art  in  England,  while  the  other  gave  a  new  temper, 
if  not  exactly  a  new  direction,  to  the  criticism  of  literature ;  and 
we  shall  have,  in  regard  to  periodicals,  to  observe  the  rise,  in  the 
first  place  of  the  weekly  newspaper,  and  then  of  the  daily,  as 
competitors  in  strictly  critical  and  literary  work  with  the  quarterly 
and  monthly  reviews,  as  well  as  some  changes  in  these  latter. 

For  just  as  we  found  that  the  first  development  of  nineteenth- 
century  criticism  coincided  with,  or  followed  upon,  a  new  departure 
or  development  in  periodicals,  so  we  shall  find  that  a  similar 
change  accompanied  or  caused  changes  in  the  middle  of  the 
century.  Although  the  popularity  of  the  quarterly  and  monthly 
reviews  and  magazines  which  had  been  headed  respectively  by 
the  Edinburgh  and  Blackivood  did  not  exactly  wane,  and  though 
some  of  the  most  brilliant  work  of  the  middle  of  the  century — 


CHAP,  ix  NEW  PERIODICALS  399 

George  Eliot's  novels,  Kingsley's  and  Froude's  essays,  and  the 
like — appeared  in  them,  the  ever  fickle  appetite  of  readers  seemed 
to  desire  something  else  in  shape,  something  different  in  price, 
style,  and  form.  Why  this  sort  of  change,  which  is  perpetually 
recurring,  should  usually  bring  with  it  a  corresponding  change, 
and  sometimes  a  corresponding  improvement,  of  literary  produc- 
tion, is  more  than  any  one  can  say,  but  the  fact  is  not  easily 
disputable. 

On  the  present  occasion  the  change  took  three  successive 
forms — first,  the  raising,  or  rather  restoring,  of  the  weekly  sixpenny 
critical  newspaper  to  a  higher  pitch  of  popularity  than  it  had  ever 
held ;  secondly,  the  cheapening  and  multiplying  of  the  monthly 
magazines ;  thirdly,  the  establishment  of  new  monthly  reviews, 
somewhat  more  resembling  the  old  quarterlies  than  anything  else, 
but  with  signed  instead  of  anonymous  articles. 

The  uprising  of  the  weekly  newspaper  took  shape  in  two  re- 
markably different  forms,  represented  respectively  by  Household 
Words,  which  Dickens  started  early  in  the  fifties,  and  by  the 
Saturday  Review,  which  came  a  little  later.  The  former  might 
best  be  described  as  a  monthly  of  the  Blackwood  and  London  kind 
cheapened,  made  more  frequent  in  issue,  and  adjusted  to  a  con- 
siderably lower  and  more  popular  standard  of  interest  and  culture 
—politics,  moreover,  being  ostensibly  though  not  quite  really 
excluded.  Dickens  contributed  to  it  largely  himself.  He  received 
contributions  from  writers  of  established  repute  like  Bulwer  and 
Lever ;  but  he  made  his  chief  mark  with  the  paper  by  breeding 
up  a  school  of  younger  writers  who  wrote  to  his  own  pattern  in 
fiction,  miscellaneous  essay,  and  other  things.  Wilkie  Collins 
was  the  chief  of  these,  but  there  were  many  others.  In  particular, 
the  periodical  developed  a  sort  of  popular,  jocular,  and  pictur- 
esque-descriptive manner  of  treating  places,  travels,  ceremonies, 
and  what  not,  which  took  the  public  fancy  immensely.  It  was 
not  quite  original  (for  Leigh  Hunt,  Wainewright  the  murderer- 
miscellanist  of  the  London,  some  of  the  Blackwood  men,  and 
others,  had  anticipated  it  to  a  certain  extent),  and  it  was  vulgarised 


400  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

as  regards  all  its  models ;  but  it  was  distinct  and  remarkable. 
The  aesthetic  and  literary  tone  of  Household  Words,  and  of  its 
successor  All  the  Year  Round  to  a  somewhat  less  extent,  was 
distinctly  what  is  called  Philistine ;  and  though  Dickens  always 
had  a  moral  purpose,  he  did  not  aim  much  higher  than  amuse- 
ment that  should  not  be  morbid,  and  instruction  of  the  middle- 
class  diffusion-of-knowledge  kind.  But  there  was  very  little  harm 
and  much  good  to  be  said  of  Household  Words ;  and  if  some  of 
the  imitations  of  it  were  far  from  being  happy,  its  own  popularity 
and  that  of  its  successor  were  very  fairly  deserved. 

The  aims,  the  character,  and  the  success  of  the  Saturday 
Review  were  of  the  most  widely  different  character.  It  was  less 
novel  in  form,  for  the  weekly  review  was  an  established  thing,  and 
had  at  least  two  very  respectable  examples — the  Examiner,  which 
(under  the  Hunts,  under  Fonblanque,  under  Forster,  and  under 
the  late  Mr.  Minto)  had  a  brilliant,  if  never  an  extremely  pros- 
perous, career  for  three-quarters  of  the  century,  and  the  Spectator, 
which  attained  a  reputation  for  unswerving  honesty  under  the 
editorship  of  Mr.  Rintoul,  and  has  increased  it  under  that  of  its 
recent  conductors.  15  nt  both  these  were  Liberal  papers  first  of 
all ;  the  Saturday  Review,  at  first  and  accidentally  Peelite,  was 
really  (throughout  the  nearly  forty  years  during  which  it  remained 
in  the  possession  of  the  same  family,  and  was  directed  by  a  suc- 
cession of  editors  each  of  whom  had  been  trained  under  his  pre- 
decessor) Independent  Tory,  or  (to  use  a  rather  unhappy  and  now 
half-forgotten  name)  Liberal-Conservative.  It  never  tied  itself  to 
party  chariot-wheels,  and  from  the  first  to  the  last  of  the  period 
just  referred  to  very  distinguished  writers  of  Liberal  and  Radical 
opinions  contributed  to  it.  But  the  general  attitude  of  the  paper 
during  this  time  expressed  that  peculiar  tone  of  mainly  Con- 
servative persiflage  which  has  distinguished  in  literature  the  great 
line  of  writers  beginning  with  Aristophanes.  Its  staff  was,  as 
a  rule,  recruited  from  the  two  Universities  (though  there  was 
no  kind  of  exclusion  for  the  unmatriculated  ;  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  neither  of  its  first  two  editors  was  a  son  either  of  Oxford  or 


ix  THE  SATURDAY  REVIEW  4OI 

Cambridge),  and  it  always  insisted  on  the  necessity  of  classical 
culture.  It  eschewed  the  private  personality  which  had  been  too 
apt  to  disfigure  newspapers  of  a  satirical  kind  during  the  first  half 
of  the  century;  but  it  claimed  and  exercised  to  the  full  the 
privilege  of  commenting  on  every  public  writing,  utterance,  or 
record  of  the  subjects  of  its  criticism.  It  observed,  for  perhaps  a 
longer  time  than  any  other  paper,  the  salutary  principles  of 
anonymity  (real  as  well  as  ostensible)  in  regard  to  the  authorship 
of  particular  articles ;  and  those  who  knew  were  constantly 
amused  at  the  public  mistakes  on  this  subject. 

Applying  this  kind  of  criticism, — perfectly  fearless,  on  the  whole 
fairly  impartial,  informed,  human  errors  excepted,  by  a  rather 
exceptionally  high  degree  of  intelligence  and  education,  and  above 
all  keeping  before  it  the  motto,  framed  by  its  "  sweet  enemy " 
Thackeray,  of  being  written  "by  gentlemen  for  gentlemen," — the 
Saturday  Review  quickly  attained,  and  for  many  years  held,  the 
very  highest  place  in  English  critical  journalism  as  regards  liter- 
ature, in  a  somewhat  less  degree  politics,  and  in  a  degree  even 
greater  the  farrago  of  social  and  miscellaneous  matters.  By 
consent  too  general  and  too  unbiassed  to  be  questioned,  it  gave 
and  maintained  a  certain  tone  of  comment  which  prevailed  for 
the  seventh,  eighth,  and  ninth  decades  of  the  century,  and  of 
which  the  general  note  may  be  said  to  have  been  a  coolly  scornful 
intolerance  of  ignorance  and  folly.  There  were  those  who  accused 
it,  even  in  its  palmiest  days,  of  being  insufficiently  positive  and 
constructive ;  but  on  the  negative  side  it  was  generally  sound  in 
intention,  and  in  execution  admirably  thorough.  It  may  some- 
times have  mishandled  an  honest  man,  it  may  sometimes  have 
forgiven  a  knave ;  but  it  always  hated  a  fool,  and  struck  at  him 
with  might  and  with  main. 

The  second  change  began  with  the  establishment  of  The 
CornhUl  and  Macmillaris  Magazine,  two  or  three  years  later. 
There  was  no  perceptible  difference  in  the  general  scheme  of 
these  periodicals  from  that  of  the  earlier  ones,  of  which  Black- 
wood  and  Fraser  were  the  most  famous ;  but  their  price  was 

2   D 


402  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM 


lowered  from  half  a  crown  to  a  shilling,  and  the  principle  of 
signed  articles,  and  of  long  novels  by  famous  names,  was  adopted. 
The  editorship  of  Thackeray  in  the  Cornhill,  with  the  contribu- 
tions of  Matthew  Arnold  and  others,  quickly  gave  a  character  to 
it ;  while  Macmillaris  could  boast  contributions  from  the  Kingsleys, 
Henry  and  Charles,  as  well  as  from  many  others.  From  this  time 
the  monthly  magazine,  with  the  exception  of  Blackwood,  found  a 
shilling,  which  attempts  have  been  recently  made  to  lower  to 
sixpence,  its  almost  necessary  tariff,  while  the  equal  necessity  of 
addressing  the  largest  possible  audience  made  pure  politics,  with 
occasional  exceptions,  unwelcome  in  it.  It  is  to  the  credit  of  the 
English  magazines  of  this  class,  however,  that  they  have  never 
relinquished  the  tradition  of  serious  literary  studies.  Many  of 
the  essays  of  Mr.  Arnold  appeared  first  either  in  one  or  the  other 
of  the  two  just  mentioned  :  the  Cornhill  even  ventured  upon  Mr. 
Ruskin's  Unto  this  Last ;  and  other  famous  books  of  a  permanent 
character  saw  the  light  in  these,  in  Temple  Bar,  started  by  Mr. 
Bentley,  in  the  rather  short-lived  Sf.  Paul's,  of  which  Anthony 
Trollope  was  editor,  and  in  others. 

Whether  the  starting  of  the  monthly  "  Review"  as  distinguished 
from  the  "  Magazine,"  which  came  again  a  little  later  towards  the 
middle  or  end  of  the  sixties,  be  traceable  to  a  parallel  popularisation 
of  the  quarterly  ideal — to  the  need  for  the  political  and  "  heavy  " 
articles  which  the  lightened  monthlies  had  extruded — or  to  a 
mere  imitation  of  the  famous  French  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  is 
an  academic  question.  The  first  of  these  new  Reviews  was  the 
Fortnightly,  which  found  the  exact  French  model  unsuitable  to 
the  meridian  of  Greenwich,  and  dropped  the  fortnightly  issue, 
while  retaining  the  title.  It  was  followed  by  the  Contemporary, 
the  Nineteenth  Century,  and  others.  The  exclusion  of  fiction  in 
these  was  not  invariable — the  Fortnightly,  in  particular,  has 
published  many  of  Mr.  Meredith's  novels.  But,  as  a  rule,  these 
reviews  have  busied  themselves  with  more  or  less  serious  subjects, 
and  have  encouraged  signed  publication. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  impossible  here  to  go  through  all,  or 


IX  CRITICS  AND  ESSAYISTS  403 

even  all  the  most  noteworthy,  of  the  periodicals  of  the  century. 
We  are  dealing  with  classes,  not  individuals,  and  the  only  class  yet 
to  be  noticed — daily  newspapers  falling  out  of  our  ken  almost 
entirely  —  are  those  weekly  newspapers  which  have  eschewed 
politics  altogether.  The  oldest  and  most  famous  of  these  is  the 
Athenceum,  which  was  founded  before  George  the  Fourth's  reign 
ended,  while  between  forty  and  fifty  years  later  The  Academy  was 
founded  on  the  same  general  principles.  But  the  Athenceum  has 
always  cleaved,  as  far  as  its  main  articles  went,  to  the  unsigned 
system,  while  the  Academy  started  at  a  period  which  leant  the 
other  way.  Of  late  years,  too,  criticism  proper,  that  is  to  say,  of 
letters  and  art,  has  played  a  larger  and  larger  part  in  daily  news- 
papers, some  of  which  attempt  a  complete  review  of  books  as  they 
appear,  while  others  give  reviews  of  selected  works  as  full  as  those 
of  the  weeklies.  If  any  distinct  setting  of  example  is  necessary  to 
be  attributed  in  this  case,  the  credit  is  perhaps  mainly  due  to  the 
original  Pall  Mall  Gazette,  an  evening  newspaper  started  in  1864 
with  one  of  the  most  brilliant  staffs  ever  known,  including  many 
of  the  original  Saturday  writers  and  others. 

The  result  of  this  combined  opportunity  and  stimulus  in  so 
many  forms  has  been  that  almost  the  whole  of  the  critical  work 
of  the  latter  part  of  the  century  has  passed  through  periodicals—- 
that,  except  as  regards  Mr.  Ruskin,  a  writer  always  indocile  to 
editing,  every  one  who  will  shortly  be  mentioned  in  this  chapter 
has  either  won  his  spurs  or  exercised  them  in  this  kind,  and 
that  of  the  others,  mentioned  in  other  chapters  and  in  connection 
with  other  subjects,  a  very  small  proportion  can  be  said  to  have 
been  entirely  disdainful  of  periodical  publication.  At  the  very 
middle  of  the  century,  and  later,  the  older  Quarterlies  were 
supported  by  men  like  John  Wilson  Croker,  a  survival  of  their 
first  generation,  Nassau  W.  Senior,  and  Abraham  Hayward,  the 
last  a  famous  talker  and  "diner-out."  Other  chief  critics  and 
essayists,  besides  Kingsley  and  Froude,  were  George  Brimley, 
Librarian  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge;  Henry  Lancaster,  a 
Balliol  man  and  a  Scotch  barrister ;  and  Walter  Bagehot,  a  banker. 


404  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

and  not  a  member  of  either  University.  Brimley  has  left  us  what 
is  perhaps  the  best  appreciation  of  Tennyson  in  the  time  between 
the  days  when  that  poet  was  flouted  or  doubted  by  the  usual  critic, 
and  those  when  he  was  accepted  as  a  matter  of  course  or  cavilled 
at  as  a  matter  of  paradox ;  and  Lancaster  occupies  pretty  much 
the  same  position  with  regard  to  Thackeray.  It  is  not  so  easy 
to  single  out  any  particular  and  distinguishing  critical  effort  of 
Bagehot's,  who  wrote  on  all  subjects,  from  Lombard  Street  to 
Tennyson,  and  from  the  Coup  cfEtat  (which  he  saw)  to  Browning. 
But  his  distinction  of  the  poetical  art  of  Wordsworth  and  that  of 
these  other  poets  as  "pure,  ornate,  and  grotesque"  will  suffice  to 
show  his  standpoint,  which  was  a  sort  of  middle  place  between 
the  classical  and  the  Romantic.  Bagehot  wrote  well,  and 
possessed  a  most  keen  intelligence.  Also  to  be  classed  here  are 
Dr.  John  Brown  of  Edinburgh,  the  very  agreeable  author  of  Hortz 
Subsetivce,  and  James  Hannay,  a  brilliant  journalist,  a  novelist  of 
some  merit  and  an  essayist  of  more,  and  author  of  A  Course  of 
English  Literature  which,  though  a  little  popular  and  desultory, 
is  full  of  sense  and  stimulus. 

Most  popular  of  all  at  the  time  was  Sir  Arthur  Helps  (1813-75), 
a  country  gentleman  of  some  means  and  of  the  usual  educa- 
tion, who  took  to  a  mixed  life  of  official  and  literary  work,  did 
some  useful  work  in  regard  to  Spanish  -  American  history,  but 
acquired  most  popularity  by  a  series  of  dialogues,  mostly  occupied 
by  ethical  and  aesthetic  criticism,  called  Friends  in  Council. 
This  contains  plenty  of  knowledge  of  books,  touches  of  wit  and 
humour,  a  satisfactory  standard  of  morals  and  manners,  a  certain 
effort  at  philosophy,  but  suffers  from  the  limitations  of  its  date. 
In  different  ways  enough — for  he  was  as  quiet  as  the  other  was 
showy — Helps  was  the  counterpart  of  Kinglake,  as  exhibiting  a 
certain  stage  in  the  progress  of  English  culture  during  the  middle 
of  the  century — a  stage  in  which  the  Briton  was  considerably  more 
alive  to  foreign  things  than  he  had  been,  had  enlarged  his  sphere 
in  many  ways,  and  was  at  least  striving  to  be  cosmopolitan,  but 
had  lost  insular  strength  without  acquiring  Continental  suppleness 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  405 


Of  the  literary  critic  who  attracted  most  public  attention  during 
this  period, — the  late  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold, — considerable  mention 
has  already  been  made  in  dealing  with  his  poetry,  and  biographical 
details  must  be  looked  for  there.  It  will  be  remembered  that  Mr. 
Arnold  was  not  very  early  a  popular  writer  either  as  poet  or  prose- 
man,  that  his  poetical  exercises  preceded  by  a  good  deal  his  prose, 
and  that  these  latter  were,  if  not  determined,  largely  influenced  by 
his  appointment  to  the  Professorship  of  Poetry  at  Oxford.  He 
began,  however,  towards  the  end  of  the  fifties  and  the  beginning 
of  the  sixties,  to  be  much  noticed,  not  merely  as  the  deliverer  of 
lectures,  but  as  the  contributor  of  essays  of  an  exceedingly  novel, 
piquant,  and  provocative  kind  ;  and  in  1865  these,  or  some  of 
them,  were  collected  and  published  under  the  title  of  -Essays  in 
Criticism.  These  Essays — nine  in  number,  besides  a  character- 
istic preface — dealt  ostensibly  for  the  most  part,  if  not  wholly,  with 
literary  subjects, — "The  Function  of  Criticism,"  "The  Literary 
Influence  of  Academies,"  "The  Guerins  "  (brother  and  sister), 
"  Heine,"  "  Pagan  and  Mediaeval  Religious  Sentiment,"  "  Joubert," 
"  Spinoza,"  and  "  Marcus  Aurelius," — but  they  extended  the 
purport  of  the  title  of  the  first  of  them  in  the  widest  possible  way. 
Mr.  Arnold  did  not  meddle  with  art,  but  he  extended  the  province 
of  literature  outside  of  it  even  more  more  widely  than  Mr.  Ruskin 
did,  and  was,  under  a  guise  of  pleasant  scepticism,  as  dogmatic 
within  the  literary  province  as  Mr.  Ruskin  in  the  artistic.  It  might 
almost  be  said  that  Mr.  Arnold  put  himself  forth,  with  a  becoming 
attempt  atmodesty  of  manner,  but  with  very  uncompromising  inten- 
tions, as  "  Socrates  in  London,"  questioning,  probing,  rebuking 
with  ironical  faithfulness,  the  British  Philistine — a  German  term 
which  he,  though  not  the  first  to  import  it,  made  first  popular — in 
literature,  in  newspapers,  in  manners,  in  politics,  in  philosophy. 
Foreign,  and  specially  French,  ways  were  sometimes  directly, 
sometimes  obliquely,  held  up  as  examples  for  our  improvement ; 
and  the  want  of  "ideas,"  the  want  of  "light,"  the  want  of 
"  culture,"  was  dwelt  on  with  a  mixture  of  sorrow  and  satire. 
All  this  was  couched  in  a  very  peculiar  and  (till  its  mannerism 


406  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM 


became  irritating)  a  very  captivating  style,  which  cannot  be 
assigned  to  any  single  original,  but  which  is  a  sort  of  compound 
or  eclectic  outcomejof  the  old  Oxford  academic  style_as  it  may 
be  seen  at  times  in  Newman,  of  French  persiflage,  and  of  some 
elements  peculiar  to  Mr.  Arnold  himself.  The  strongest,  though 
the  most  dangerous,  of  these  elements  was  a  trick  of  iterating 
words  and  phrases,  sometimes  exactly,  sometimes  with  a  very  slight 
variation,  which  inevitably  arrested  attention,  and  perhaps  at  first 
produced  conviction,  on  the  principle  formulated  by  a  satirist 
(also  of  Oxford)  a  little  later  in  the  words — 

What  I  tell  you  three  times  is  true. 

But  besides  and  underneath  all  this  flourish,  all  this  wide-ranging 
scatter  of  sometimes  rather  hap-hazard  arrows,  there  was  a  solid 
literary  value  in  Mr.  Arnold's  method.  As  has  been  noticed  earlier 
in  this  chapter,  the  literary  essay  of  the  best  kind  had  somewhat 
gone  off  in  England  during  the  middle  of  the  century,  and  the 
short,  crisp  criticisms  which  had  appeared  to  take  its  place  in 
weekly  papers  were  almost  necessarily  exposed  to  grave  faults  and 
inadequacies.  It  was  Mr.  Arnold's  great  merit  that  by  holding  up 
Sainte-Beuve,  from  whom  he  had  learnt  much,  and  other  French 
critics,  and  by  urging  successfully  the  revival  of  the  practice  of 
"  introducing  "  editions  of  classics  by  a  sound  biographical  and 
critical  essay  from  the  pen  of  some  contemporary,  he  did  much 
to  cure  this  state  of  things.  So  that,  whereas  the  corpus  of 
English  essay-criticism  between  1800  and  1835  or  thereabouts  is 
admirable,  and  that  of  1835  to  1865  rather  thin  and  scanty,  the 
last  third  of  the  century  is  not  on  such  very  bad  terms  as  regards 
the  first.  And  he  gave  example  as  well  as  precept,  showing — 
though  his  subjects,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Guerins,  were  sometimes 
most  eccentrically  selected — a  great  deal  of  critical  acuteness, 
coupled,  it  may  be,  with  something  of  critical  "will-worship,"  with 
a  capricious  and  unargued  preference  of  this  and  rejection  of  that, 
but  exhibiting  wide  if  not  extraordinarily  deep  reading,  an  honest 
enthusiasm  for  the  best  things,  and  above  all  a  fascinating 
rhetoric. 


MATTHEW  ARNOLD  407 


The  immediate  effect  of  this  remarkable  book  was  good 
almost  unmixedly  on  two  of  the  three  parties  concerned.  It  was 
more  than  time  for  the  flower  of  middle-class  complacency,  which 
horticulturists  of  all  degrees,  from  Macaulay  downwards,  had 
successively  striven  to  cultivate,  and  which  was  already  over- 
blown, to  drop  from  its  stalk ;  and  the  whiff  of  pleasant  scorn 
which  Mr.  Arnold  directed  at  it  was  just  the  thing  to  puff  it  off. 
So  the  public,  upon  which  he  was  never  likely  to  produce  too 
much  effect,  had  reason  to  thank  him  for  the  effect  that  he  did 
produce,  or  helped  to  produce.  And  on  the  critics  too  his  effect, 
or  the  effect  of  which  he  was  the  symptom  and  voice,  was  also  good, 
recalling  them  on  the  one  hand  from  the  dulness  of  the  long 
reviews  of  the  period,  and  on  the  other  from  the  flippancy  of  the 
short,  while  inculcating  a  wider  if  not  always  a  sounder  comparison. 
Practically  German  poetry  had  nothing  left  to  do  in  Mr.  Arnold's 
day,  and  French  had  much  :  he  thought  just  the  other  way, 
and  reserved  his  encomium  of  France  for  its  prose,  in  which  it 
was  drooping  and  failing.  But  this  did  not  matter :  it  is  the 
general  scope  of  the  critic's  advice  which  is  valuable  in  such 
cases,  and  the  general  scope  of  Mr.  Arnold's  was  sound.  On  the 
third  party,  however, — himself, — the  effect  was  a  little  disastrous. 
The  reception  which,  after  long  waiting,  he  had  attained,  encour- 
aged him  not  so  much  to  continue  in  his  proper  sphere  of  literary 
criticism  as  to  embark  on  a  wide  and  far-ranging  enterprise  of 
general  censure,  which  narrowed  itself  pretty  rapidly  to  an  attempt 
to  establish  undogmatic  on  the  ruins  of  dogmatic  Christianity.,, 
It  would  be  very  improper  to  discuss  such  an  undertaking  on  the 
merits  here  ;  or  to  criticise  narrowly  the  series  of  singular  treatises 
which  absorbed  (with  exceptions,  no  doubt,  such  as  the  quaint 
sally  of  Friendships  Garland  on  the  occasion  of  the  Franco- 
German  War)  Mr.  Arnold's  energies  for  some  fifteen  or  sixteen 
years.  The  titles  —  Culture  and  Anarchy,  God  and  the  Bible, 
St.  Paul  and  Protestantism,  Literature  and  Dogma,  etc.  —  are 
well  known.  Of  the  contents  it  is  enough  to  say  that,  apart 
from  the  popular  audacity  of  their  wit  and  the  interesting  spectacle 


4oS  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

of  a  pure  man  of  letters  confidently  attacking  thorny  questions 
without  any  apparatus  of  special  knowledge  and  study,  they  have 
not  been  generally  thought  quite  worthy  of  their  author.  There 
are  many  brilliant  passages  in  these  books  as  writing,  just  as  there 
are  some  astonishing  lapses  of  taste  and  logic ;  but  the  real  fault 
of  the  whole  set  is  that  they  are  popular,  that  they  undergo  the 
very  curse,  on  speaking  without  qualification  and  without  true 
culture,  which  Mr.  Arnold  had  himself  so  freely  pronounced. 

Fortunately,  however,  he  never  quite  abandoned  the  old 
ways ;  and  in  his  last  years  he  returned  to  them  almost  wholly. 
Nothing  better  of  the  kind  (individual  crotchets  always  excepted) 
has  ever  been  written  than  his  introductions  to  selected  lives 
from  Johnson's  Poets,  to  Byron  (crotchety  and  unsound  as  is 
the  reference  to  Shelley),  to  Wordsworth  (the  best).  He  aided 
others  ;  and  a  collection  of  his  purely  or  mainly  literary  work 
is  still  a  desideratum.  Even  this  would  be  extremely  unequal 
and  open  to  exception  here  and  there.  But  it  would  contain 
some  of  the  very  best  things  to  be  found  in  any  English  critic. 
And  this  after  all,  if  not  the  absolutely  highest,  is  one  of  the 
highest  things  that  can  be  said  of  a  critic,  and  one  of  the  rarest. 
Undoubtedly  the  influence  of  Mr.  Arnold  did  not  make  for  good 
entirely.  He  discouraged — without  in  the  least  meaning  to  do  so, 
and  indeed  meaning  quite  the  contrary — seriousness,  thorough- 
ness, scholarship  in  criticism.  He  discouraged — without  in  the 
least  meaning  to  do  so,  and  indeed  meaning  quite  the  contrary — 
simplicity  and  unaffectedness  in  style.  But  he  was  a  most 
powerful  stimulus,  and  in  some  ways,  if  not  in  all,  a  great  example. 
Some  at  least  of  the  things  he  said  were  in  the  very  greatest 
need  of  saying,  and  some  of  the  ways  in  which  he  said  them  were 
inimitably  charming. 

Contemporary  with  Mr.  Arnold,  and  his  complement  in  critical 
influence,  was  John  Ruskin,  who  lived  till  2oth  January  1900. 
and  who  had  been  for  half  a  decade,  since  the  death  of  Mr. 
Froude,  the  sole  surviving  man  of  letters  of  the  first  class  who  had 
published  before  the  middle  of  the  century.  He  was  born  in 


MR.  RUSKIN  409 


1819  :  he  gave  us  copious  accounts  of  his  family,  of  his  youth 
at  Denmark  Hill,  and  so  forth,  and  all  the  world  knows  that  his 
father  was  a  sherry  merchant  who,  though  he  lived  rather  plainly, 
was  able  to  give  his  son  an  early  and  plentiful  indulgence  in  that 
Continental  travel  which  had  so  much  to  do  with  developing  his 
genius.  Mr.  Ruskin's  education  was  oddly  combined ;  for,  after 
going  to  no  school,  he  was  sent  to  Christ  Church  as  a  gentle- 
man-commoner and  took  his  degree  in  1842,  having  gained 
the  Newdigate  three  years  earlier.  He  wrote  a  good  deal  of 
other  verse  in  his  early  years, — and  he  made  himself  a  not 
inconsiderable  draughtsman.  But  his  real  vocation  was  as 
little  the  practice  of  art  as  it  was  the  practice  of  poetry.  As 
early  as  1843  there  appeared,  by  "a  Graduate  of  Oxford," 
the  first  volume  of  the  famous  Modern  Painters,  which  ran  to 
five  large  volumes,  which  covered  seventeen  years  in  its  original 
period  of  publication,  and  which  was  very  largely  altered 
and  remodelled  by  the  author  during  and  after  this  period.  But 
Mr.  Ruskin  by  no  means  confined  his  energies  before  1860  to 
this  extensive  task.  The  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture  (1849),  and 
(between  1851  and  1853)  the  larger  Stones  of  Venice,  did  for  archi- 
tecture what  the  companion  work  did  for  painting.  The  Pras- 
Raphaelite  movement  of  the  middle  of  the  century  found  in  Mr. 
Ruskin  an  ardent  encomiast  and  literary  apostle,  and  between 
1850  and  1860  he  delivered  divers  lectures,  the  text  of  which — 
Architecture  and Painting  (1854),  Political  Economy  of 'Art  (1858) — 
was  subsequently  published  in  as  elaborately  magnificent  a  style  as 
his  other  works.  As  Modern  Painters  drew  to  its  close  he  became 
prolific  of  more  numerous  and  shorter  works,  generally  with  some- 
what fantastic  but  agreeable  titles — Unto  this  Last  (1861),  Munera 
Pulveris  (1862),  Sesame  and  Lilies  (1865),  The  Cestus  of  Aglaia 
(1865),  The  Ethics  of  the  Dust  (1866),  The  Crown  of  Wild  Olh-e 
(1866),  Time  and  Tide  by  Wear  and  Tyne  (1867),  The  Queen  of 
the  Air  (1869),  Aratra  Pentelici  and  The  Eagles  Nest  (1872). 
Ariadne  Florentines  (1873),  Proserpina  and  Deucalion  (1875  se1-\ 
St.  Mark's  Rest  and  Prcetcrita  (1885).  Not  a  few  of  these  were 


410  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP 


issued  in  parts  and  numbers,  but  Mr.  Ruskin's  bulkiest  and  most 
characteristic  venture  in  this  kind  was  Pars  Chwigera,  which  was 
published  at  irregular  intervals  from  1871  to  1884.  He  produced 
many  other  things  even  in  book  form,  besides  innumerable  essays 
and  letters,  some  of  them  afterwards  collected  in  two  gatherings — 
Arrows  of  the  Chace  and  On  the  Old  Road. 

Two  things  are  mainly  perceptible  in  this  immense  and  at  first 
sight  rather  bewildering  production.  The  first,  the  most  disput- 
able and  probably  the  least  important,  though  the  most  at  the 
author's  heart,  is  a  vast,  fluctuating,  but  on  the  whole  pretty 
coherent  body  of  doctrine  in  reference  to  Art.  Up  to  Mr. 
Ruskin's  day,  aesthetics  had  been  little  cultivated  in  England,  and 
such  handlings  of  the  subject  as  existed — Burke's,  Adam  Smith's, 
Alison's,  and  a  few  others — were  of  a  jejune  and  academic  char- 
acter. Even  writers  of  distinct  literary  genius  and  of  great  taste 
for  the  matter,  who  had  not  resided  abroad  long,  such  as  Hazlitt, 
much  more  such  as  Charles  Lamb  and  Hartley  Coleridge,  betray 
the  want  of  range  and  practice  in  examples.  Even  the  valuable 
and  interesting  work  of  Mrs.  Jameson  (1794-1860)  was  more 
occupied  with  careful  arrangement  and  attractive  illustration 
than  with  original  theory ;  and,  well  as  she  wrote,  her  Character- 
istics of  Shakespeare's  Women  (1832)  is  perhaps  more  important  as 
literature  than  the  series  of  volumes — Sacred  and  Legendary  Art, 
etc.  —  which  she  executed  between  1845  and  her  death.  The 
sense  of  the  endless  and  priceless  illustration  of  the  best  art 
which  was  provided  by  Gothic  architecture,  domestic  and  ecclesi- 
astical, was  only  wakening ;  as  for  painting,  the  examples  publicly 
visible  in  England  were  very  few,  and  even  private  collections 
were  mostly  limited  to  one  or  two  fashionable  schools — Raphael 
and  his  successors,  the  later  Low  Country  schools,  the  French 
painters  in  the  grand  style,  and  a  few  Spaniards. 

Strongly  impressed  by  the  Romantic  revival  (he  was  all  his 
life  of  the  staunchest  of  Sir  Walter's  devotees),  a  passionate  lover 
of  Gothic  architecture  both  at  home  and  abroad,  and  early  drawn 
both  to  the  romantic  nature-painting  of  Turner  and  the  gorgeous 


MR.   RUSKIN  411 


colouring  of  the  early  Italian  schools,  Mr.  Ruskin  heralded  Art 
with  a  passion  of  which  eighteenth-century  "gusto"  had  had  no 
notion.  But  he  was  by  no  means  satisfied  with  heralding  Art 
alone.  Anathematising  at  once  the  doctrine  that  utility  is  beauty 
— that  beauty  is  utility  he  would  always  have  cheerfully  admitted 
— and  the  doctrine  that  the  beautiful  is  not  necessarily  connected 
either  with  utility,  with  goodness,  or  with  truth,  he  from  the  first 
and  to  the  last  endeavoured  to  work  ethics  and  aesthetics  into  a 
sort  of  single  texture  of  warp  and  woof  respectively,  pushing  his 
endeavours  into  the  most  multiform,  the  most  curious,  and  it  must 
be  owned  sometimes  the  most  grotesque  ramifications  and  ex- 
tremities. But  he  was  not  satisfied  with  this  bold  attempt  at  the 
marriage  of  two  things  sometimes  deemed  hostile  to,  and  generally 
held  to  be  independent  of,  one  another.  He  must  needs  be  bolder 
still,  and  actually  attempt  to  ally  with  Art,  if  not  to  subject  to  her, 
the  youngest,  the  most  rebellious,  and,  as  it  might  seem,  the  most 
matter-of-fact  and  utilitarian  of  all  the  sciences — that  of  Political 
Economy.  As  we  have  seen,  he  had  brought  the  subjects  together 
in  lectures  pretty  early  in  his  career,  and  he  developed  the  com- 
bination further  in  the  eccentric  book  called  Unto  this  Last, 
originally  published  in  the  Cornhill  Magazine  as  noted  above.  In 
this  Esthetics  and  Economics  combined  took  a  distinctly  Socialist 
turn  ;  .and  as  England  was  under  the  very  fullest  dominion  of  the 
Liberal  middle-class  regime,  with  its  belief  in  laissez-faire  and  in 
supply-and-demand,  Mr.  Ruskin  was  not  a  little  pooh-poohed.  It 
would  be  improper  here  to  attack  or  to  defend  his  views,  but  it  is 
part  of  the  historian's  duty  to  say  that,  for  good  or  for  ill,  they 
have,  though  in  forms  different  from  his  and  doubtless  by  no  means 
always  meeting  his  approval,  made  constant  headway,  and  that 
much  legislation  and  still  more  agitation  on  the  extreme  Liberal 
side,  and  not  there  only,  may  be  said  to  represent,  with  very  slight 
transformation,  Ruskinian  doctrine  applied,  now  and  then,  to  very 
anti-Ruskinian  purposes. 

With  regard  to  aesthetics  proper,  it  might  be  contended,  with- 
out too  much  rashness,  that  the  history  of  Ruskinism  has  not  been 


412  LATER  JOURNALISM   AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

different ;  but  to  some  observers  it  seems  to  have  described  rather 
a  curve  than  a  steady  ascent.  After  being,  between  1840  and  1860, 
laughed  at,  despised,  attacked  all  at  once,  Mr.  Ruskin  found  his 
influence  as  an  art  teacher  rise  steadily  during  the  seventh  decade 
of  the  century,  and  attain  its  highest  point  about  the  close 
thereof,  when  he  was  made  Slade  Professor  in  his  own  university, 
and  caused  young  Oxford  to  do  many  fantastic  things.  But,  as 
always  happens,  the  hour  of  triumph  was  the  hour,  not,  perhaps, 
of  downfall,  but  of  opposition  and  renegation.  Side  by  side  with 
Mr.  Ruskin's  own  theories  had  risen  the  doctrine  of  Art-for-Art's 
sake,  which,  itself  as  usual  half  truth  and  half  nonsense,  cut  at 
the  very  root  of  Ruskinism.  On  the  other  hand,  the  practical 
centre  of  art -schools  had  shifted  from  Italy  and  Germany  to 
Paris  and  its  neighbourhood,  where  morality  has  seldom  been  able 
to  make  anything  like  a  home ;  and  the  younger  painters  and 
sculptors,  full  of  realism,  impressionism,  and  what  not,  would 
have  none  of  the  doctrines  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  stood  in 
immediate  relationship  of  antecedence  to  their  own.  Lastly,  it 
must  be  admitted  that  the  extreme  dogmatism  on  all  the  sub- 
jects of  the  encyclopaedia  in  which  Mr.  Ruskin  had  seen  fit  to 
indulge,  was  certain  to  provoke  a  revolt.  But  with  the  substance 
of  Ruskinism,  further  than  is  necessary  for  comprehension,  we  are 
not  concerned. 

Yet  there  are  not  many  things  in  the  English  nineteenth 
century  with  which  a  historian  is  more  concerned  than  with  the 
style  of  the  deliverance  of  these  ideas.  We  have  noticed  in 
former  chapters — we  shall  have  to  notice  yet  more  in  the  con- 
clusion—  the  attempts  made  in  the  years  just  preceding  and 
immediately  following  Mr.  Ruskin's  birth,  by  Landor,  by  De 
Quincey,  by  Wilson,  and  by  others  in  the  direction  of  ornate,  of — 
as  some  call  it— flamboyant  English  prose.  All  the  tendencies 
thus  enumerated  found  their  crown  and  (lower  in  Mr.  Ruskin 
himself.  That  later  the  crowns  and  the  flowers  were,  so  to  speak, 
divided,  varied,  and  multiplied  by  later  practitioners,  some  of 
whom  will  presently  be  noticed,  while  more  are  still  alive,  is  quite 


ix  MR.    RUSKIN  413 

true.  But  still  it  is  not  very  unsafe  to  prophesy  that  the 
flamboyant  style  of  the  nineteenth  century  will  be  found  by 
posterity  to  have  reached  its  highest  exposition  in  prose  with  Mr. 
Ruskin  himself. 

Like  all  great  prose  styles — and  the  difference  between  prose 
and  poetry  here  is  very  remarkable — this  was  born  nearly  full 
grown.  The  instances  of  comparison  in  those  who  have  tried 
both  harmonies  are  rare ;  those  in  poets  only  are  delusive  and 
uncertain.  But  with  the  three  greatest  poets  of  England  who 
have  also  been  great  prose  writers — Milton,  Dryden,  Shelley — the 
assertion  that  the  distinctive  quality  of  their  prose  developed  itself 
earlier  than  the  distinctive  quality  of  their  verse  is  only  disputable 
in  the  case  of  Milton.  And  Milton,  as  it  happened,  wrote  prose 
and  verse  in  manners  more  nearly  approaching  each  other  than 
any  one  on  record.  Mr.  Ruskin  never  was  a  poet,  except  in 
extreme  minority ;  but  he  was  a  very  great  prose  writer  from 
the  first.  It  is  almost  inconceivable  that  good  judges  can  ever 
have  had  any  doubt  about  him.  It  is  perfectly — it  is,  indeed, 
childishly  easy  to  pick  faults,  even  if  matter  be  kept  wholly  out 
of  sight.  ^In  Mr.  Ruskin's  later  books  a  certain  tendency  to  con- 
versational familiarity  sometimes  mocks  those,  and  not  those  only, 
who  hold  to  the  tradition  of  dignified  and  ex  cathedra  pronounce- 
ment ;  in  his  earlier,  and  in  all,  it  is  possible  for  Momus  to  note 
an  undue  floridness,  an  inclination  to  blank  verse  in  prose, 
tricks  and  manners  of  this  or  that  kind  unduly  exuberant  and 
protuberant. 

But  when  all  these  things  have  been  allowed  for  to  the  very 
fullest,  what  an  enormous  advance  there  is  on  anything  that  had 
gone  before  !  The  ornate  prose  writers  of  the  seventeenth  century 
had  too  frequently  regarded  their  libraries  only ;  they  had  seldom 
looked  abroad  to  the  vast  field  of  nature,  and  of  art  other  than 
literary  art.  The  ornate  writers  of  the  eighteenth,  great  as  they 
were,  had  been  as  afraid  of  introspection  as  of  looking  outwards, 
and  had  spun  their  webs,  so  far  as  style  and  ornament  were  con- 
cerned, of  words  only.  Those  of  the  early  nineteenth  had  been 


4M  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 


conscious  of  revolt,  and,  like  all  conscious  revolters,  had  not 
possessed  their  souls  in  sufficient  quietness  and  confidence. 
Landor,  half  a  classic  and  half  a  Romantic,  had  been  too  much  the 
slave  of  phrase, — though  of  a  great  phrase.  Wilson,  impatient  in 
everything,  had  fluctuated  between  grandeur  and  galimatias,  bathos 
and  bad  taste ;  De  Quincey,  at  times  supreme,  had  at  others 
simply  succumbed  to  "rigmarole."  Mr.  Ruskin  had  a  gift  of 
expression  equal  to  the  best  of  these  men  ;  and,  unlike  them,  he 
had  an  immense,  a  steady,  a  uniform  group  of  models  before 
him.  Indulge  as  he  might  m  extravagance,  there  were  always 
before  him,  as  on  a  vastly  extended  dais  set  before  the  student, 
the  glories  of  nature  and  of  art,  the  great  personalities  and  pro- 
ductions of  the  great  artists.  He  had  seen,  and  he  could  see 
(which  is  a  different  thing),  the  perennial  beauties  of  mountain 
and  cloud,  of  tree,  and  sea,  and  river ;  the  beauties  long,  if  not 
perennial,  of  architecture  and  painting.  A  man  may  say  foolish 
things, —  Mr.  Ruskin  did  say  plenty;  but  when  he  has  Venice 
and  Amiens  and  Salisbury,  the  Alps  and  the  Jura  and  the 
Rhine,  Scott  and  Wordsworth,  Turner  and  Lionardo,  always 
silently  present  before  his  mind's  eye,  he  can  never,  if  he  is  a  man 
of  genius,  go  wholly  wrong.  And  he  can  never  go  more  than  a 
little  wrong  when  he  is  furnished  by  his  genius  with  such  a  gift  of 
expression  as  Mr.  Ruskin  possessed. 

For  this  gift  of  expression  was  such  as  had  never  been  seen 
before,  and  such  as,  for  all  the  copying  and  vulgarising  of  it,  has 
never  been  seen  since.  It  is  a  commonplace  of  literary  history 
that  description,  as  such,  is  not  common  or  far  advanced  in  the 
earlier  English  prose.  We  find  Gray,  far  on  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  trying  to  describe  a  sunrise,  and  evidently  vexed  at  the 
little  "  figure  it  makes  on  paper."  Then  the  tourists  and  the 
travellers  of  the  end  of  that  age  made  valiant  but  not  always 
well-directed  efforts  to  induce  "it"  to  make  a  figure  on  paper. 
Then  came  the  experts  or  student-interpreters  in  ornate  prose 
who  have  been  mentioned.  And  then  came  Mr.  Ruskin 
"  Never  so  before  and  never  quite  so  since,"  must  be  the  re- 


IX  MR.   RUSKIN  415 

peated  verdict.  The  first  sprightly  runnings  in  these,  as  in  other 
kinds,  are  never  surpassed.  Kingsley,  an  almost  contemporary,  Mr. 
Swinburne,  a  younger  rival,  have  come  near ;  others  have  done 
creditably  in  imitation ;  none  has  equalled,  and  certainly  none 
has  surpassed.  Let  the  reader  read  the  "  Wave  Studies  "  in  the 
first  volume  of  Modern  Painters,  the  "  Pine  Forest  in  the  Jura," 
the  "Angel  of  the  Sea,"  the  youngest  of  which  was  written  before 
the  year  1860,  and  say,  if  he  has  any  knowledge  of  English  litera- 
ture, whether  there  had  been  anything  like  any  of  these  before. 
Shelley,  perhaps,  in  some  of  his  prose  had  gone  near  it.  Shelley 
was  almost  as  great  a  prose  writer  as  he  was  a  poet.  No  one  else 
could  even  be  mentioned. 

Nor  was  it  mere' description,  great  as  Mr.  Ruskin  is  in  that, 
which  differentiated  him  so  strongly.  He  is  a  bad  arguer ;  but 
his  arguments  are  couched  in  rhetoric  so  persuasive  that  the  very 
critics  who  detect  his  fallacies  would  almost  consent  to  forfeit  the 
power  of  detecting,  if  they  could  acquire  that  of  constructing,  such 
delightful  paralogisms.  His  crotchets  of  all  sorts  are  sometimes 
merely  childish,  and  not  even  always  or  very  often  original ;  for, 
like  all  fertile  minds,  he  never  could  receive  any  seed  of  thought 
from  another  but  it  bore  plant  and  fruit  at  once.  But  the  state- 
ment of  them  is  at  its  best  so  captivating  that  weaklings  may 
pardonably  accept,  and  strong  men  may  justly  tolerate,  the  worth- 
less kernel  for  the  sake  of  the  exquisite  husk.  Few  men  have  less 
of  the  true  spirit  of  criticism  than  Mr.  Ruskin,  for  in  his  enthu- 
siasm he  will  compass  sea  and  land  to  exalt  his  favourite,  often 
for  reasons  which  are  perfectly  invalid ;  and  in  his  depreciation  he 
is  not  to  be  trusted  at  all,  having  a  feminine  rather  than  a  mascu- 
line faculty  of  unreasoned  dislike.  But  praise  or  blame,  argue  or 
paralogise  as  he  may,  the  golden  beauty  of  his  form  redeems  his 
matter  in  the  eyes  of  all  but  those  who  are  unhappy  enough  no: 
to  see  it. 

That  his  influence  has  been  wholly  good  no  one  can  say. 
There  is  scarcely  a  page  of  him  that  can  be  safely  accepted  on  the 
whole  as  matter,  and  the  unwary  have  accepted  whole  volumes; 


416  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

his  form  is  peculiarly  liable  to  abuse  in  the  way  of  imitation,  and 
it  has  actually  been  abused  to  nausea  and  to  ridicule.  But  this  is 
not  his  fault.  There  is  so  little  subtlety  about  Mr.  Ruskin  that 
he  can  hardly  deceive  even  an  intelligent  child  when  he  goes 
wrong.  There  is  so  much  genius  about  him  that  the  most 
practised  student  of  English  can  never  have  done  with  admiration 
at  the  effects  that  he  produces,  after  all  these  centuries,  with  the 
old  material  and  the  old  tools.  He  is  constantly  provocative  of 
adverse,  even  of  severe  criticism  ;  of  half  the  heresies  from  which 
he  has  suffered— not  only  that  of  impressionism — he  was  himself 
the  unconscious  heresiarch.  And  yet  the  more  one  reads  him 
the  more  one  feels  inclined  almost  to  let  him  go  uncriticised,  to 
vote  him  the  primacy  in  nineteenth -century  prose  by  simple 
acclamation. 

Richard  (or  as  his  full  name  ran),  John  Richard  Jefferies, 
occupies,  though  an  infinitely  smaller  and  a  considerably  lower 
place  than  Mr.  Ruskin's,  yet  one  almost  as  distinctly  isolated  in 
a  particular  department  of  aesthetic  description.  The  son  of  a 
farmer  at  Coate,  in  North  Wiltshire,  and  born  in  November 
1848,  he  began  journalism  at  eighteen,  and  was  a  contributor  to 
the  North  Wilts  Herald  till  he  was  nearly  thirty.  Then  he  went 
to  London,  and  in  1878  published  some  sketches  (previously  con- 
tributed to  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette)  under  the  title  of  The  Game- 
Keeper  at  Home.  These,  though  not  much  bought,  were  very 
much  admired  ;  and  Jefferies  was  encouraged  to  devote  himself 
to  work  of  the  same  kind,  which  he  varied  with  curious  and  not 
very  vigorous  semi -philosophic  speculations  and  attempts  at 
downright  novels  (a  kind  which  he  had  also  tried  in  his  youth). 
Unfortunately  the  peculiar  sort  of  descriptive  writing  in  which  he 
excelled  was  not  very  widely  called  for,  could  hardly  under  the 
most  favourable  circumstances  have  brought  in  any  great  sums 
of  money,  and  was  peculiarly  liable  to  degenerate  when  written  to 
order.  It  does  not  appear  that  Jefferies  had  the  rare  though 
sometimes  recorded  power  of  accommodating  himself  to  ordinary 
newspaper  hack-work,  while  reserving  himself  for  better  things  now 


ix  JEFFERIES  41? 

and  then ;  and  finally,  he  had  not  been  long  in  London  before 
painful  and  ultimately  fatal  disease  added  to  his  troubles.  He 
died  in  August  1887,  being  not  yet  forty.  A  burst  of  popularity 
followed ;  his  books,  The  Game-Keeper  at  Home,  Wild  Life  in  a 
Southern  Country,  The  Amateur  Poacher,  Round  about  a  Great 
Estate,  etc.,  none  of  which  had  been  printed  in  large  numbers, 
were  sold  at  four  or  five  times  their  published  price  ;  and,  worst  of 
all,  cheap  imitations  of  his  style  began  to  flood  the  newspapers. 
Nay,  the  yet  later  result  of  this  imitation  was  that  another  reaction 
set  in,  and  even  Jefferies'  own  work  was  once  more  pooh-poohed. 
The  neglect,  the  over-valuation,  and  the  shift  back  to  injustice, 
were  all  examples  of  the  evils  which  beset  literature  at  the  present 
time,  and  which  the  much-blamed  critic  is  almost  powerless  to 
cause  or  cure.  In  other  days  Jefferies  was  quite  as  likely  to  have 
been  insufficiently  rewarded  at  first  by  the  public ;  but  he  would 
then  have  had  no  temptation  to  over-write  himself,  or  try  alien 
tasks,  and  he  would  have  stood  a  very  good  chance  of  a  pension, 
or  a  sinecure,  or  an  easy  office  in  church  or  state,  on  one  or  other 
of  which  he  might  have  lived  at  ease  and  written  at  leisure. 
Nothing  else  could  really  have  been  of  service  to  him,  for  his 
talent,  though  rare  and  exquisite,  was  neither  rich  nor  versatile. 
It  consisted  in  a  power  of  observing  nature  more  than  Words- 
worthian  in  delicacy,  and  almost  Wordsworthian  in  the  presence 
of  a  sentimental  philosophic  background  of  thought.  Unluckily 
for  Jefferies,  his  philosophic  background  was  not  like  Words- 
worth's, clear  and  cheerful,  but  wholly  vague  and  partly  gloomy. 
Writing,  too,  in  prose  not  verse,  and  after  Mr.  Ruskin,  he 
attempted  an  exceedingly  florid  style,  which  at  its  happiest  was 
happy  enough,  but  which  was  not  always  at  that  point,  and  which 
when  it  was  not  was  apt  to  become  trivial  or  tawdry,  or  both. 
It  is  therefore  certain  that  his  importance  for  posterity  will 
dwindle,  if  it  has  not  already  dwindled,  to  that  given  by  a  bundle 
of  descriptive  selections.  But  these  will  occupy  a  foremost  place 
on  their  particular  shelf,  the  shelf  at  the  head  of  which  stand 
Gilbert  White  and  Gray. 


4i8  LATKR  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

Mr.  Arnold,  it  has  been  said,  abstained  almost  entirely  from 
dealing  with  art.  Mr.  Ruskin,  who  abstained  from  dealing  with 
nothing,  did  not  abstain  from  criticism  of  literature,  but  his 
utterances  in  it  were  even  more  than  usually  obiter  dicta.  Yet  we 
must  take  the  two  together  if  we  are  to  understand  the  most 
powerful  influence  and  the  most  flourishing  school  of  criticism, 
literary  and  other,  of  the  last  generation  of  the  century.  This 
school  may  be  said  to  halt  in  a  way  between  purely  literary  and 
generally  aesthetic  handling,  and  when  it  can  to  mix  the  two. 
Most  of  its  scholars — men  obviously  under  the  influence  both  of 
Arnold  and  of  Ruskin,  either  in  submission  or  in  revolt,  are  alive, 
and  we  reason  not  of  them.  But,  as  it  happens,  the  two  most 
famous,  one  of  whom  was  a  prose  writer,  pure  and  simple,  the 
other  a  copious  artist  in  prose  and  verse,  died  early  enough  to 
call  for  judgment.  These  were  Walter  Horatio  Pater  and  John 
Addington  Symonds. 

The  first- named  was  born  in  1839,  and  went  to  Oxford, 
where  he  was  elected  to  a  fellowship  at  Brasenose.  He  spent 
the  whole  of  the  rest  of  his  life  either  at  that  college  or  in  London, 
practising  no  profession,  competing  for  no  preferment,  and  for 
many  years  at  least  producing  literature  itself  with  extreme 
sparingness.  It  was  in  1873  that  Mr.  Pater  first  collected  a 
volume  of  Studies  in  the  History  of  the  Renaissance,  which  attracted 
the  keenest  attention  both  as  to  its  manner  and  as  to  its 
matter.  The  point  of  view,  which  was  that  of  an  exceedingly 
refined  and  carefully  guarded  Hedonism,  was,  in  a  way  and  at 
least  in  its  formulation,  novel.  Mr.  Pater  did  not  meddle  with 
any  question  of  religion  ;  he  did  not  (though  there  were  some 
who  scented  immorality  in  his  attitude)  offend  directly  any 
ethical  prejudice  or  principle.  But  he  laid  it  down  explicitly 
in  some  places,  implicitly  throughout,  that  the  object  of  life 
should  be  to  extract  to  the  utmost  the  pleasure  of  living  in 
the  more  refined  way,  and  expressly  and  especially  the  pleasure  tc 
be  derived  from  education  and  art.  The  indebtedness  of  this 
both  to  the  Arnoldian  and  Ruskinian  creeds,  its  advance  (in  the 


ix  PATER  419 

main  a  legitimate  advance)  on  the  former,  and  its  heretical  devia- 
tion from  the  development  of  the  latter,  require  no  comment. 
But  this  propaganda,  if  so  violent  a  word  may  be  used  of  Mr. 
Pater's  placid  creed,  called  to  aid  a  most  remarkable  style — a  style 
of  the  new  kind,  lavish  of  adjective  and  the  mot  de  himiere,  but 
not  exceedingly  florid,  and  aiming  especially  at  such  an  arrange- 
ment of  the  clause,  the  sentence,  and  the  paragraph,  such  a 
concerted  harmony  of  cadence  and  symphony,  as  had  not  been 
deliberately  tried  before  in  prose.  The  effects  which  it  produced 
on  different  tastes  were  themselves  sufficiently  different.  Some 
found  the  purport  too  distasteful  to  give  a  dispassionate  attention 
to  the  presentment ;  others  disliked  the  manner  itself  as  formal, 
effeminate,  and  "precious."  But  there  were  others  who,  while 
recognising  the  danger  of  excess  in  this  direction,  thought  and 
think  that  a  distinct  and  remarkable  experiment  had  been  made 
in  English  prose,  and  that  the  best  examples  of  it  deserved  a  place 
with  the  best  examples  of  the  ornater  styles  at  any  previous  time 
and  in  any  other  kind. 

Mr.  Pater  was  not  tempted  by  such  popularity  as  his  book 
received  to  hasten  publication ;  indeed  it  was  understood  that 
after  beginning  to  print  a  second  collection  of  Essays,  he  became 
dissatisfied  with  them,  and  caused  the  type  to  be  broken  up. 
But  the  advance  of  so-called  ^Estheticism  was  too  strong  an 
invitation,  and  prepared  for  him  too  large  and  eager  an  audience, 
so  that  the  last  decade  of  his  life  saw  several  books,  Marius  the  Epi- 
curean, Imaginary  Portraits,  Appreciations,  while  others  appeared 
posthumously.  Of  these  the  first  named  is  unquestionably  the 
best  and  most  important.  Although  Greek  had  been  the  indis- 
pensable—  almost  the  cardinal — principle  in  Mr.  Pater's  own 
literary  development,  he  had  been  so  strongly  affected  by  modern 
thought  and  taste,  that  he  could  hardly  recover  a  dispassionate 
view  of  the  older  classics.  Imaginary  Portraits,  an  attempt  at 
constructive  rather  than  critical  art,  required  qualities  which 
he  did  not  possess,  and  even  made  him  temporarily  forget  his 
impeccable  style  :  Appreciations,  good  in  itself,  was  inferior  tc 


420  LATER  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM  CHAP. 

the  first  book.  But  Marius  the  Epicurean  far  excelled  all  these. 
It,  too,  took  the  form  of  fiction,  but  the  story  went  for  so  little  in 
it  that  deficiencies  therein  were  not  felt.  The  book  was  in  effect  a 
reconstruction,  partly  imaginative,  but  still  more  critical,  of  a  period 
with  which  Mr.  Pater  was  probably  more  in  sympathy  than  with 
any  other,  even  the  Renaissance  itself,  to  wit  the  extremely 
interesting  and  strangely  modern  period  when  classicism  and 
modernity,  Christianity  and  Paganism,  touched  and  blended  in  the 
second  century  after  Christ  after  the  fashion  revealed  to  us  in  the 
works  of  Apuleius  most  of  all,  of  Lucian  to  some  extent,  and  of  a 
few  others.  Mr.  Pater  indeed  actually  introduced  the  philosopher- 
novelist  of  Madaura  in  the  book,  though  he  was  not  the  hero ; 
and  his  own  peculiar  style  proved  itself  admirably  suited  to  the 
period  and  subject,  whether  in  description  and  conversation,  or 
in  such  translation  or  paraphrase  as  that  of  the  famous  and 
exquisite  Pervigilium  Veneris. 

For  this  style,  however,  in  perfection  we  must  still  go  back  to 
the  Studies  of  the  Renaissance,  which  is  what  Mr.  Arnold  liked 
to  call  a  point  dc  repere.  The  style,  less  exuberant,  less 
far-reaching  and  versatile,  and,  if  any  one  pleases  to  say 
so,  less  healthy  than  Mr.  Ruskin's,  is  much  more  chastened, 
finished,  and  exquisite.  It  never  at  its  best  neglects  the  differ 
ence  between  the  rhythm  of  prose  and  the  metre  of  verse ; 
if  it  is  sometimes,  and  indeed  usually,  wanting  in  simplicity, 
it  is  never  overloaded  or  gaudy.  The  words  are  picked  ;  but 
they  are  seldom  or  never,  as  has  been  the  case  with  others,  not 
only  picked  but  wrenched,  not  only  adjusted  to  a  somewhat 
unusual  society  and  use,  but  deliberately  forced  into  uses  and 
societies  wholly  different  from  those  to  which  readers  are  accus- 
tomed. Above  all,  no  one,  it  must  be  repeated,  has  ever  surpassed, 
and  scarcely  any  one  has  ever  equalled  Mr.  Pater  in  deliberate  and 
successful  architecture  of  the  prose-paragraph — in  what  may,  for 
the  sake  of  a  necessary  difference,  be  called  the  scriptorial  in  opposi- 
tion to  the  oratorical  manner.  He  may  fall  short  of  the  poetic 
grandeur  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  of  the  phantasmagoric  charm  of 


ix  SYMONDS  421 

De  Quincey  at  his  rare  best,  of  the  gorgeous  panoramas  of  Mr. 
Ruskin.  But  his  happiest  paragraphs  are  like  flamboyant  chantries, 
not  imposing,  not  quite  supreme  in  quality,  but  in  their  own  kind 
showing  wonderful  perfection  of  craftsmanship. 

Of  the  same  school,  though  a  less  exact  and  careful  practitioner 
in  it,  was  John  Addington  Symonds,  who  was  born  in  Bristol  on 
the  5th  of  October  1840,  and  died  at  Rome  on  ipth  April  1893. 
He  was  the  son  of  a  famous  doctor  whose  name  figures  often  in 
literary  history,  inasmuch  as  he  made  Clifton  a  frequent  resort  for 
persons  of  consumptive  tendencies.  Mr.  Symonds  himself  lived 
there  for  a  great  part  of  his  life.  Unfortunately  the  disease  which 
his  father  had  combated  revenged  itself  upon  him;  and  it  was  only 
by  spending  the  greater  part  of  his  later  years  at  Davos  that  he 
staved  it  off  as  long  as  he  did.  Educated  at  Harrow  and  at 
Balliol,  a  Fellow  of  Magdalen,  and  succeeding  tolerably  young  to 
an  affluent  fortune,  Mr.  Symonds  was  able  to  indulge  his  tastes, 
literary  and  other,  pretty  much  as  he  chose.  The  result  was  for- 
tunate in  one  way,  unfortunate  in  another.  He  could  hardly  have 
made  a  living  by  literature,  in  which  though  an  eager  worker  he 
was  a  thorough  dilettante.  But  if  he  had  been  at  less  liberty  to 
write  what  and  howsoever  he  pleased,  he  might  or  rather  would 
have  been  obliged  to  compress  and  chasten  the  extreme  prolixity 
and  efflorescence  of  his  style. 

His  largest  work,  the  History  of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy,  is 
actually  one  of  great  value  in  information,  thought,  and  style; 
but  its  extreme  redundance  cannot  be  denied,  and  has  indeed 
already  necessitated  a  sort  of  boiling  down  into  an  abstract.  Both 
in  prose  essays  (which  he  wrote  in  great  numbers,  chiefly  on 
Greek  or  Renaissance  subjects)  and  in  verse  (where  he  was  not  so 
successful  as  in  prose)  Mr.  Symonds  was  one  of  the  most  character- 
istic and  copious  members  of  the  rather  foolishly  named  "  cesthetic  " 
school  of  the  last  third  of  the  century,  the  school  which,  originally 
deriving  more  or  less  from  Mr.  Ruskin,  more  and  more  rejected  the 
ethical  side  of  his  teaching.  But  Mr.  Symonds,  who  had  been  very 
much  under  the  influence  of  Professor  Jowctt,  had  philosophical 


422  LATKR  JOURNALISM  AND  CRITICISM 


velleities,  which  have  become  more  generally  known  than  they 
once  were  through  the  interesting  biography  published  after  his 
death  by  Mr.  Horatio  Brown.  But  for  the  redundance  above 
mentioned,  which  is  all-pervading  with  him  both  in  thought  and 
style,  and  which  once  suggested  to  a  not  unfriendly  critic  the  re- 
mark that  he  should  like  "  to  squeeze  him  like  a  sponge,"  Symonds 
would  probably  or  rather  certainly  occupy  a  much  higher  place  than 
he  has  held  or  ever  will  hold.  For  his  appreciation  both  of  books 
and  of  nature  was  intense,  and  his  faculty  of  description  abundant. 
But  the  ventosa  et  enormis  loquacitas  of  his  style  was  everywhere,  so 
that  even  selection  would  be  hard  put  to  it  to  present  him  really 
at  his  best. 

William  Minto,  who  was  born  in  1846  and  died  in  1893, 
Professor  of  Logic  and  English  Literature  at  Aberdeen,  showed 
fewer  marks  of  the  joint  direction  of  "  aesthetic "  criticism  to 
art  and  letters  than  these  two,  and  had  less  distinct  and 
original  literary  talent.  He  had  his  education  mainly  at 
Aberdeen  itself,  where  he  was  born  and  died  ;  but  he  made 
a  short  visit  to  Oxford.  Subsequently  taking  to  journalism, 
he  became  editor  of  the  Examiner,  and  considerably  raised  the 
standard  of  literary  criticism  in  that  periodical,  while  after  quitting 
it  he  wrote  for  some  time  on  the  Daily  Neivs.  His  appointment 
to  the  professorship  enabled  him  to  devote  himself  entirely  to 
literature,  and  he  produced  some  novels,  the  best  of  which  was 
The  Crack  of  Doom.  He  had  much  earlier  executed  two  extremely 
creditable  books,  one  on  English  Prose,  and  one  on  part  of  the  His- 
tory of  English  verse,  the  only  drawbacks  to  which  were  a  rather 
pedagogic  and  stiff  arrangement ;  he  was  a  frequent  contributor 
to  the  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  and  after  his  death  some  of  his 
professorial  Lectures  on  the  Georgian  era  were  published,  but 
without  his  final  revision.  The  strongest  side  of  Minto's  criticism 
lay  in  his  combination  of  sufficiently  sound  and  wide  knowledge 
of  the  past  with  a  distinct  and  rather  unusual  sympathy  with  the 
latest  schools  of  literature  as  they  rose.  He  was  untainted  by 
the  florid  style  of  his  day,  but  wrote  solidly  and  well.  If  it  were 


ix  MINTO  423 

necessary  to  look  for  defects  in  his  work  they  would  probably  be 
found  in  a  slight  deficiency  of  comparative  estimate,  and  in  a 
tendency  to  look  at  things  rather  from  the  point  of  view  of  modern 
than  from  that  of  universal  criticism.  But  this  tendency  was  not 
in  him,  as  it  so  often  is,  associated  with  ignorance  or  presumptuous 
judgment.1 

1   For  Mr.  H.  D.  Train's  criticism  see  p.  324. 


CHAPTER    X 

SCHOLARSHIP    AND    SCIENCE 

THE  remarks  which  were  made  at  the  beginning  of  the  chapter 
on  Philosophy  and  Theology  apply  with  increasing  force  to  the 
present  chapter ;  indeed,  they  need  to  be  restated  in  a  much 
more  stringent  and  exclusive  form.  To  give  some  history  of 
English  philosophy  and  theology  in  the  nineteenth  century,  by 
noticing  its  literary  expression,  was  possible,  though  it  had  to  be 
done,  so  to  speak,  in  shorthand.  To  do  the  same  thing  with 
science,  or  even  with  what  is  technically  called  scholarship,  would 
be  simply  impossible.  Much  of  their  expression  is  hardly 
susceptible  of  literary  form  at  all,  hardly  any  ever  receives  such 
form,  while  the  subdivision  of  the  branches  of  physical  science  is 
now  so  great  and  their  shadow  so  wide  that  no  systematic  sketch 
of  them  is  to  be  thought  of.  It  is  only  possible  to  mention  a  few 
distinguished  writers,  writers  who  would  have  been  distinguished 
whatever  their  subject,  but  who  happen  to  have  devoted  them- 
selves, solely  or  mainly,  to  scientific  writing,  or  to  classical  criticism 
and  philology. 

A  curious  independent  study  might  be  made  of  the  literary 
gradations  of  classical  scholarship.  In  the  Middle  Ages,  though 
the  complete  ignorance  of  the  classics,  once  imagined  as  pre- 
vailing, has  been  shown  to  be  a  figment,  scarcely  anybody  could 
claim  to  be  a  scholar.  During  the  Renaissance  almost  every  man 
of  letters  had  necessarily  sonic  tinge  of  scholarship,  and  some  of 
the  greatest  in  its  earlier  period,  surh  as  Erasmus,  were  scholars 


OLDER  SCHOLARS  425 


first  of  all.  The  growth  of  vernacular  literature,  the  constant 
increase  and  subdivision  of  subjects,  and  the  advance  in 
minute  study  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  languages,  brought  about 
an  inevitable  cleavage,  and  from  the  seventeenth  century  onwards 
scholarship  became  an  independent  profession  or  vocation.  For 
some  considerable  time,  however,  it  was  the  almost  indispensable 
novitiate  of  a  literary  career,  and  the  tradition  that  a  scholar  must 
be  first  applied  to,  for  no  matter  what  literary  work,  was  still  potent 
in  the  times  of  Salmasius,  and  cannot  be  said  to  have  been 
discredited  in  those  of  Bentley,  who  would  undoubtedly  have 
been  as  formidable  in  purely  political  or  general  controversy  as 
he  was  on  Phalaris  or  on  his  own  private  interests.  The 
eighteenth  century,  however,  saw  the  divorce  nearly  completed,  and 
by  the  period  of  our  present  volume  it  was  an  accomplished  fact. 

Even  then,  however,  though  for  men  of  letters  it  was  not 
customary  to  turn  first  to  scholars,  scholars  had  not  ceased  to  be 
men  of  letters,  and  philology  (or  the  mere  study  of  language,  as 
apart  from  literature)  had  not  absorbed  them. 

During  that  part  of  our  period  which  is  still  concerned  with 
the  last  century,  there  were  many  excellent  scholars  in  England, 
but  perhaps  only  three — two  of  whom  as  scholars  were  of  no  great 
account — who  make  much  figure  in  purely  literary  history.  Jacob 
Bryant  (1715-1804),  an  odd  person  of  uncritical  judgment  but 
great  learning,  who  belongs  more  to  the  last  volume  than  to  the 
present,  devoted  himself  chiefly  to  mythology,  a  subject  which  had 
not  yet  attracted  general  interest,  and  which  was  treated  by  him 
and  others  in  a  somewhat  unhistorical  manner.  Gilbert  Wakefield 
(1756-1801)  was  one  of  the  characteristic  figures  of  the  Revolu- 
tionary time.  He  was  a  Cambridge  man,  and  took  orders,  but 
left  the  church,  became  a  violent  Jacobin,  and  went  to  prison  for  a 
seditious  libel.  He  was  one  of  those  not  very  uncommon  men 
who,  personally  amiable,  become  merely  vixenish  when  they  write  : 
and  his  erudition  was  much  more  extensive  than  sound.  But  he 
edited  several  classical  authors,  not  wholly  without  intelligence 
and  scholarship,  and  his  Silva  Critica,  a  sort  of  variorum 


426  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE 


commentary  from  profane  literature  on  the  Bible,  was  the 
forerunner,  at  least  in  scheme,  of  a  great  deal  of  work  which 
has  been  seen  since. 

A  very  different  person  from  these  in  scholarly  attainments,  in 
natural  gifts,  and  (it  must  unfortunately  be  added)  in  personal 
respectability,  was  Richard  Porson,  who  is  generally  bracketed  with 
Bentley  as  the  greatest  of  English  scholars,  not  of  our  own  day, 
and  who  might  have  been  one  of  the  most  brilliant  of  men  of 
letters.  He  was  born  in  Norfolk  on  Christmas  Day  1759,  of  low 
station,  but  was  well  educated  by  the  parson  of  the  parish,  and 
sent  to  Eton  by  a  neighbouring  squire.  In  1779  he  went  to  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  obtained  a  scholarship,  did  brilliantly  in  Uni- 
versity contests  and  became  fellow  in  1782.  Although  he  was  almost 
a  boy  the  genius  of  his  papers  in  scholarship  attracted  notice  at 
home  and  abroad,  and  he  made  some  excursions  into  general  litera- 
ture wherein,  as  in  his  recorded  conversations,  he  showed  epigram- 
matic wit  of  the  first  rank.  He  lost  his  fellowship  because  he  would 
not  take  orders ;  but  was  made  Regius  Professor  of  Greek,  an  ap- 
pointment which  unluckily  was  then,  in  both  Universities,  almost 
honorary  as  regards  income.  The  Whig  party  accepted  his  par- 
tisanship, but  had  no  opportunity  of  rewarding  it,  and  after  receiv- 
ing the  Librarianship  of  the  London  Institution  in  Moorfields,  he 
died  of  apoplexy  in  1808.  He  possessed  in  almost  the  highest 
degree  that  power  of  divination,  based  on  accurate  knowledge, 
which  distinguishes  the  scholar,  and  it  is,  as  has  been  said,  nearly 
certain  that  he  would  have  been  a  brilliant  writer  in  English  on 
any  subject  he  chose  to  take  up.  But  he  was  a  hopeless  drunkard, 
an  offensive  sloven,  rude  and  aggressive  in  society — in  short  a 
survival  of  the  Grub  Street  pattern  of  the  century  of  his  birth.  Thi? 
period,  which  was  that  of  Burney,  Elmsley,  Gaisford,  and  other 
scholars,  robust  but  not  very  literary  (except  in  the  case  of 
Elmsley,  who  was  a  contributor  both  to  the  Edinburgh  and 
the  Quarterly  Reviews'),  was  succeeded  by  one  in  which 
the  English  Universities  did  not  greatly  distinguish  them 
selves  in  this  department.  Gaisford  indeed  lived  till  1855  at 


CONINGTON  427 


Oxford,  and  Cambridge  produced  among  other  respectable 
scholars  the  already  mentioned  Maiden  and  George  Long 
(1800-1879),  a  Lancashire  man,  who  went  to  Trinity,  distin- 
guished himself  greatly,  but  found  such  preferment  as  he  met 
with  outside  his  university,  in  America,  at  University  College, 
London,  and  elsewhere.  Long  was  a  great  diffusion-of-useful- 
knowledge  man,  and  edited  the  Penny  Cydopcedia ;  but  he  did 
more  germane  work  later  in  editing  the  Bibliotheca  Classica,  an 
unequal  but  at  its  best  excellent  series  of  classics,  and  in  dealing 
with  the  great  stoics  Marcus  Aurelius  and  Epictetus.  He  was 
also  one  of  the  mainstays  of  the  most  important  enterprise  of 
the  middle  of  the  century  in  classical  scholarship,  the  Classical 
Dictionaries  edited  by  the  late  Sir  William  Smith  and  published 
by  Mr.  Murray ;  and  he  wrote  an  extensive  but  not  extraordinarily 
valuable  Decline  of  the  jRoman  Reptiblic.  Long  appears  to  have 
been  one  of  those  men  who,  with  great  ability,  vast  knowledge, 
and  untiring  industry,  somehow  or  other  miss  their  proper  place, 
whether  by  fault  or  fate  it  is  hard  to  say. 

About  1860  three  remarkable  persons  illustrated  scholarship 
in  the  Universities  of  Oxford,  Cambridge,  and  Edinburgh  re- 
spectively, with  a  combination  of  literary  and  linguistic  knowledge 
which  had  been  growing  rarer  up  to  their  time,  and  which  has 
grown  rarer  still  since. 

The  Oxford  representative  was  John  Conington,  who  was  born 
at  Boston  on  loth  August  1825.  He  went  to  Rugby  and  to  Mag- 
dalen College,  Oxford,  whence  he  migrated  to  University  College, 
and  there  obtained  a  fellowship,  making  nearly  a  clean  sweep  of 
the  chief  University  prizes  meanwhile.  He  became  in  1854  the 
first  Professor  of  Latin,  and  held  the  post  till  his  death  in  1869. 
He  edited  Virgil,  /Eschylus  (part)  and  Persius,  translated  Horace, 
Homer,  and  Virgil,  and  did  a  certain  amount  of  miscellaneous 
literary  work.  He  was  neither  a  very  exact  nor  a  very  great 
scholar  :  his  scholarship  indeed  took  rather  the  character  of  that 
of  foreign  nations,  other  than  Germany,  than  the  dogged  minute- 
ness of  German,  or  the  large  but  solid  strength  of  English  study 


428  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE 


of  the  classics.  But  he  was  an  exceedingly  stimulating  professor ; 
and  coming  at  the  time  when  it  did,  his  work  was  valuable  as  a 
reminder  that  the  classics  are  live  literature,  and  not  so  much 
dead  material  for  science. 

Hugh  Andrew  Johnstone  Munro,  a  native  of  Elgin,  where  he 
was  born  in  1819,  a  Shrewsbury  boy  and  a  scholar  and  fellow  of 
Trinity  College,  Cambridge,  who  became  Professor  of  Latin 
there  in  1869  and  died  in  1882,  was  an  incomparably  greater 
verbal  scholar  than  Conington,  and  may  fairly  be  said  to  have 
taken  up  the  torch  of  Bentley  and  Person.  His  great  edition 
(with  a  less  great  translation)  of  Lucretius,  his  work  on  Horace 
and  Catullus,  and  his  scattered  papers,  all  come  up  to  a  very  high 
standard ;  and  in  the  delightful  art  of  Greek  and  Latin  composi- 
tion in  verse,  where  England  has  long  stood  paramount,  and 
which,  since  she  has  abandoned  it,  remains  uncultivated  through- 
out Europe,  he  was  almost  supreme.  But  Munro,  though  he 
never  surrendered  wholly  to  the  philological  heresy,  was  affected 
thereby  ;  and  some  of  his  Lucretian  readings  were  charged  with  a 
deficiency  in  ear  such  as  that  with  which  he  justly  reproached 
his  German  predecessors. 

The  most  strictly  literary  of  the  three  has  yet  to  be  men- 
tioned. William  Young  Sellar,  born  near  Golspie  in  the  same 
year  as  Conington,  was  educated  at  the  Edinburgh  Academy,  at 
the  University  of  Glasgow,  and  (as  a  Snell  exhibitioner)  at  Balliol. 
After  holding  an  Oriel  fellowship  for  some  years,  and  doing 
professorial  or  assistant -professorial  work  at  Durham  and  St. 
Andrews,  he  became  in  1863  Professor  of  Humanity  at  Edin- 
burgh, and  remained  so  till  his  death  in  1890.  In  the  year  of 
his  election  to  the  professorship  appeared  his  Roman  Poets  of  the 
Republic,  quite  the  best  book  of  its  kind  existing  in  English  ;  and 
this  was  followed  up  by  others  on  Virgil,  Horace,  Tibullus,  and 
Propertius— good,  but  less  good,  the  mannered  correctness  of  the 
Augustans  evidently  appealing  to  the  author  less  than  the  more 
strictly  poetic  excellence  of  Lucretius  and  Catullus.  Attempts,  too 
few  but  noteworthy,  have  since  been  made  to  handle  classical 


x  SELLAR— ROBERTSON  SMITH  429 

literature  in  the  style  of  the  Roman  Poets  of  the  Republic,  but 
it  has  never  been  surpassed,  and  it  has  very  seldom  been 
equalled. 

On  another  scheme  and  in  other  circumstances  names  like 
those  of  Kennedy  and  Shilleto,  of  Linwood  and  Burges,  of  Monk 
and  Blomfield,  would  cry  for  admission  here,  but  as  it  is  they 
must  be  ruled  out.  And  it  is  not  possible  to  widen  the  scope 
much,  so  as  to  take  in  some  eminent  students  who  have  given 
not  unliterary  expression  to  the  study  of  languages  and  subjects 
other  than  the  classical.  It  has  indeed  been  a  constantly  in- 
creasing feature  of  the  century  that  fresh  studies — ^Egyptology, 
the  study  of  the  Semitic  languages,  the  study  of  the  older  forms 
not  merely  of  English  but  of  the  other  modern  tongues,  the 
enormous  range  of  knowledge  opened  to  Englishmen,  and  as 
it  were  forced  on  them  by  our  possession  of  India  and  our  com- 
merce and  connection  with  other  nations  of  the  East,  as  well  as 
the  newer  subjects  of  comparative  mythology,  folk-lore,  and  the 
like,  all  more  or  less  offshoots  of  what  may  be  generally  termed 
scholarship,  have  been  added  to  the  outer  range  of  the  Humanities. 
Some  of  these  appeal  to  very  few,  none  of  them  to  more  than 
few  persons ;  and  literature,  in  its  best  description  if  not  exactly 
definition,  is  that  which  does  or  should  appeal  to  all  persons 
of  liberal  education  and  sympathies.  Yet  one  exponent  of  these 
studies  (and  of  more  than  one  of  them)  must  have  a  place 
here,  as  well  for  the  more  than  professionally  encyclopaedic 
character  of  his  knowledge  as  for  his  intellectual  vigour  and  his 
services  to  letters. 

William  Robertson  Smith  was  born  in  1846,  and  died  in 
1894.  A  native  of  Aberdeenshire,  the  son  of  a  Free  Kirk 
minister,  and  educated  at  Aberdeen  and  elsewhere,  he  became 
Professor  of  Hebrew  in  the  Free  Church  College  of  that  city,  and 
for  some  years  discussed  his  subject,  in  the  manner  of  the 
Germans,  without  hindrance.  At  last  his  articles  in  the  Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica  gave  offence,  and  after  much  controversy  he 
was  deprived  of  his  chair  in  1881.  Two  years  later,  however,  he 


430  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE 


was  made  Lord  Almoner's  Professor  of  Arabic  at  Cambridge, 
where  he  also  became  Fellow  of  Christ's  and  University  Librarian. 
And  from  a  contributor  he  proceeded  to  be  first  assistant-editor 
and  then  editor  in  chief  of  the  Encyclopedia.  His  health,  never 
very  strong,  became  worse  and  worse,  and  he  finally  succumbed 
to  a  complication  of  diseases.  It  was  understood  that  the 
theological  scandal  connected  with  his  name  was  anything  but  a 
pleasure  to  him,  and  the  justice  of  it  does  not  concern  us ;  but 
his  repute  as  an  Orientalist  is  uncontested.  Besides  works 
directly  bearing  on  the  Bible,  he  wrote  two  important  books 
on  Kinship  and  Marriage  in  Early  Arabia  and  on  The  Religion 
of  the  Semites.  He  was  at  least  as  remarkable  for  general  as  for 
special  learning,  and  if  not  actually  a  great  man  of  letters,  had  a 
knowledge  of  literature  rivalled  by  few  of  his  contemporaries. 

To  turn  to  physical  science,  Sir  Humphry  Davy,  a  great 
chemist  and  no  mean  writer,  was  born  at  Penzance  in  December 
1778.  His  father  was  a  wood-carver,  but  he  himself  was  ap- 
prenticed to  a  surgeon-apothecary,  and  betook  himself  seriously 
to  chemistry.  Fortunately  for  him,  Dr.  Beddoes,  the  father  of 
the  poet,  a  physician  of  great  repute  at  Clifton,  took  him  to  be 
his  assistant  there,  and  Davy,  in  his  twentieth  year,  not  only  had 
much  improved  opportunities  of  study,  but  made  valuable  friends, 
both  among  the  persons  of  rank  who  then  frequented  Clifton  for 
health,  and  among  the  literary  society  of  which  Coleridge  and 
Southey  were  then  the  ornaments  in  Bristol.  This  part  of  his 
sojourn  was  noteworthy  for  his  experiments  with  nitrous  oxide 
("laughing  gas").  These  attracted  a  great  deal  of  attention, 
and  in  1801,  being  then  barely  twenty-three,  he  was  appointed  to 
a  lectureship  in  the  Royal  Institution,  London.  His  appointment 
was  the  beginning  of  a  series  of  brilliant  lectures  in  the  same 
place  during  almost  the  whole  of  the  century,  first  by  Davy 
himself,  then  by  his  assistant  Faraday,  and  then  by  Faraday's 
assistant  Tyndall.  He  was  knighted  in  1812,  and  soon  after- 
wards married  Mrs.  Apreece,  a  lively,  pretty,  and  wealthy  widow. 
His  later  years  were  occupied,  first  by  the  investigations  which 


x  DAVY  43i 

led  to  the  perfecting  of  his  famous  safety-lamp  for  coal-mines 
(these  brought  him  a  handsome  testimonial  and  a  baronetcy),  and 
later  by  electrical  researches.  He  had  not  reached  middle  age 
when  his  health  began  to  fail,  and  he  died  in  1829,  aged  little 
more  than  fifty.  In  connection  with  literary  science  or  scientific 
literature  Davy  was  perhaps  more  remarkable  as  a  lecturer  than 
as  a  writer,  but  his  accomplishments  as  the  latter  were  consider- 
able, and  in  his  later  years  he  wrote  two  non-scientific  books, 
Salmonia  and  Consolations  in  Travel.  These  (though  the  former 
was  attacked  as  the  work  of  an  amateur  and  a  milksop  by 
Christopher  North)  were  very  popular  in  their  day.  Davy  always 
kept  up  his  friendship  with  men  of  letters,  especially  the  Lake 
Poets  and  Scott  (who  was  a  connection  of  his  wife's),  and  he  was 
no  very  small  man  of  letters  himself. 

A  contemporary  (though  very  much  longer  lived)  of  Davy's, 
and  the  most  famous  Englishwoman  who  has  ever  written  on 
scientific  subjects,  was  Mary  Fairfax,  better  known  from  the  name 
of  her  second  husband  as  Mrs.  Somerville.  She  was  born  at 
Jedburgh  on  26th  December  1780,  and  when  twenty-four  married 
her  cousin,  Captain  Greig,  a  member  of  a  family  of  Scotchmen 
who  had  settled  in  the  Russian  navy.  Her  first  husband  died 
two  years  afterwards,  and  six  years  later  she  married  Dr.  William 
Somerville,  also  her  cousin.  She  had  already  devoted  much 
attention,  especially  during  her  widowhood,  to  mathematics  and 
astronomy ;  and  after  her  second  marriage  she  had  no  difficulty 
in  pursuing  these  studies.  She  adapted  Laplace's  Mecanique 
Celeste  in  1823,  and  followed  it  up  by  more  original  work  on 
physics,  astronomy,  and  physical  geography.  Her  life  was  pro- 
longed till  1872,  and  an  interesting  autobiography  appeared  a 
year  later.  It  is  possible  that  Mrs.  Somerville  profited  somewhat 
in  reputation  by  her  coincidence  with  the  period  of  "diffusion  of 
useful  knowledge."  But  she  had  real  scientific  knowledge  and 
real  literary  gifts ;  and  she  made  good  use  of  both. 

Of  at  least  respectable  literary  merit,  though  hardly  of  enough  to 
justify  the  devoting  of  much  space  to  them  here,  were  Sir  David 


432  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE  CHAP. 

Brcwstcr  (1781-1868),  Sir  John  Herschel  (1792-1871),  Sir  Charles 
Lyell  (1797-1875),  Sir  Roderick  Murchison  (1792-1871),  the  first  a 
mathematician  and  physicist,  the  second  an  astronomer,  the  thiid 
and  fourth  geologists,  and  all  more  or  less  copious  writers  on  their 
several  subjects.  John  Tyndall  (1820-1893),  a  younger  man  than 
any  of  these,  had  perhaps  a  more  distinctly  literary  talent.  Born 
in  Ireland,  and  for  some  time  a  railway  engineer,  he  gave  himself 
up  about  1847  to  the  study  and  teaching  of  physics,  was  remark- 
able for  the  effect  of  his  lecturing,  and  held  several  Govern- 
ment appointments.  His  Presidential  Address  to  the  British 
Association  at  Belfast  in  1874  was  not  less  noteworthy  for 
materialism  in  substance  than  for  a  brilliant  if  somewhat  brassy 
style. 

But  the  chief  Englishmen  of  science  who  were  men  of 
letters  during  our  period  were  Charles  Darwin  and  Thomas 
Huxley.  The  opinions  of  the  first  of  these,  their  origin,  the 
circumstances  of  their  first  expression,  and  the  probabilities  of 
their  future,  have  been  the  subject  of  about  as  much  controversy 
as  in  a  given  time  has  been  bestowed  upon  any  subject,  certainly 
on  any  similar  subject.  But  we  enjoy  here  the  privilege  of 
neglecting  this  almost  entirely.  Darwin  is  to  the  literary  historian  a 
very  interesting  subject,  for  he  was  the  grandson  of  Erasmus  Darwin, 
who  himself,  besides  being  the  capital  example  of  the  polished 
mediocrity  of  eighteenth-century  verse  when  all  freshness  had  gone 
out  of  it,  was  a  man  of  science  and  an  evolutionist  in  his  way. 
•  Charles  (who  was  also  christened  Robert)  was  the  son  of  yet  another 
Dr.  Darwin,  an  F.R.S.  He  was  born  on  i2th  February  1809  at 
Shrewsbury,  and  his  mother  was  (as  was  afterwards  his  wife)  a 
daughter  of  the  Wedgwoods  of  Etruria.  After  passing  through 
the  famous  school  of  his  native  town,  Darwin  went  to  Edinburgh 
for  some  years  and  then  entered  Christ's  College,  Cambridge,  in 
1828.  Here  he  devoted  himself  to  physical  science,  and  after 
taking  his  degree  was,  in  1831,  appointed  to  the  Beagle,  which 
was  starting  on  a  scientific  cruise.  He  spent  five  years  in  the 
South  Seas  and  did  not  return  to  England  till  late  in  1836 — a 


DARWIN 


433 


voyage  which  perhaps  prejudicially  affected  his  health,  but 
established  his  knowledge  of  nature.  After  his  return  he  settled 
down  to  scientific  work,  alone  and  in  the  scientific  societies, 
married  in  1839,  ano^  was  busy  for  many  years  afterwards  in 
publishing  the  results  of  the  voyage.  -  He  possessed  considerable 
means,  and  for  the  last  forty  years  of  his  life  lived  at  his  ease  at 
Down  near  Beckenham,  experimenting  in  crossing  species  and 
maturing  his  views.  These  took  form,  under  circumstances 
interesting  but  foreign  to  our  theme,  in  the  famous  Origin  of 
Species,  published  in  1859,  and  this  was  followed  by  a  great 
number  of  other  books,  the  most  noteworthy  of  which,  if  not  the 
scientifically  soundest,  was  The  Descent  of  Man  (1871).  Darwin 
died  after  many  years  of  continuous  ill-health  on  igth  April  1882. 
Late  in  life  he  is  said  to  have  confessed  that  his  relish  for 
Shakespeare  and  for  pure  literature  generally,  which  had  in  earlier 
days  been  keen,  had  entirely  vanished.  But  there  was  perhaps 
nothing  very  surprising  in  this,  seeing  that  he  had  for  half  a 
century  given  himself  up  with  extraordinary  and  ever-increasing 
thoroughness  to  a  class  of  investigations  the  most  remote  possible 
from  literature,  and  yet  not,  as  pure  mathematical  study  not 
seldom  induces  its  votaries,  inducing  men  to  cultivate  letters 
by  mere  contrast.  Yet  the  ancestral  literary  tendency  had 
only  fallen  dormant  in  him  then ;  and  earlier  it  had  been  active. 
It  can  indeed  hardly  be  said  that  either  his  contribution  to  the 
Voyage  of  the  Beagle,  or  The  Origin  of  Species,  or  The  Descent  of 
Man,  or  any  of  the  others,  is  absolutely  remarkable  for  style  in  the 
ordinary  sense  of  that  phrase.  The  style  of  Darwin  attempts  no 
ornateness,  and  on  the  other  hand  it  is  not  of  those  extremely 
simple  styles  which  are  independent  of  ornament  and  to  which 
ornament  would  be  simply  a  defacement.  But  it  is  very  clear ;  it 
is  not  in  the  least  slovenly ;  and  there  is  about  it  the  indefinable 
sense  that  the  writer  might  have  been  a  much  greater  writer, 
simply  as  such,  than  he  is,  if  he  had  cared  to  take  the  trouble,  and 
had  not  been  almost  solely  intent  upon  his  matter.  Such  writers 
are  not  so  common  that  they  should  be  neglected,  and  they  may 

2  F 


434  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE  CHAP. 


at  least  stand  in  the  Court  of  the  Gentiles,  the  "  provincial  band  " 
of  literature. 

A  very  remarkable  book  which  was  in  a  way  Darwinism  before 
Darwin,  which  attracted  much  attention  and  violent  opposition  in 
1844,  the  year  of  its  publication,  and  which  for  a  long  time 
remained  unowned,  was  the  Vestiges  of  Creation,  subsequently 
known  to  be  the  work  of  Robert  Chambers,  the  younger  of  two 
brothers  who  did  great  things  in  the  popular  publishing  trade  at 
Edinburgh,  and  who  founded  a  house  which  has  always  been 
foremost  in  the  diffusion  of  sound  and  cheap  literature,  informa- 
tion, and  amusement.  Robert  was  born  at  Peebles  in  1802  and 
died  at  St.  Andrews  in  1871,  having  been,  besides  his  publishing 
labours,  a  voluminous  author  and  compiler.  Nothing  he  did 
was  quite  equal  to  the  Vestiges,  a  book  rather  literary  than 
scientific,  and  treating  the  still  crude  evolution  theory  rather  from 
the  point  of  view  of  popular  philosophy  than  from  that  of  strict 
biological  investigation  ;  but  curiously  stimulating  and  enthusiastic, 
with  a  touch  of  poetry  in  it  not  often  to  be  found  in  such  books, 
and  attractive  as  showing  the  way  in  which  doctrines  which  are 
about  to  take  a  strong  hold  of  the  general  mind  not  infrequently 
communicate  themselves,  in  an  unfinished  but  inspiring  form,  to 
persons  who,  except  general  literary  culture  and  interest,  do  not 
seem  to  offer  any  specially  favourable  soil  for  their  germination. 
Purely  scientific  men  have  usually  rather  pooh-poohed  the  Vestiges, 
but  there  is  the  Platonic  quality  in  it. 

The  Vestiges,  like  its  more  famous  successor,  was  violently 
attacked  as  irreligious.  One  of  its  opponents,  from  a  point  of 
view  half  orthodox  and  half  scientific,  was  Hugh  Miller,  a  man  of 
sterling  excellence,  of  an  interesting  and  in  its  close  melancholy 
career,  of  real  importance  as  a  geologist,  and  possessed  of  an 
extremely  agreeable  literary  faculty.  Miller  was  born  at  Cromarty 
in  1802, 'and  though  more  than  fairly  educated,  held  till  he  was 
past  thirty  no  higher  position  than  that  of  a  stone-mason.  He 
had  begun  to  write,  however,  earlier  than  this,  and,  engaging  in 
particular  in  the  two  rather  dissimilar  subjects  of  geology  and 


x  HUGH  MILLER— HUXLEY  435 

"  Free  Kirk  "  polemic,  he  was  made  editor  of  the  Witness,  a  news- 
paper started  in  the  interest  of  the  new  principles.  After  nearly 
twenty  busy  years  of  journalism  and  authorship  he  shot  himself  in 
December  1856,  as  it  is  supposed  in  a  fit  of  insanity  brought  on 
by  overwork.  Miller  was  a  very  careful  observer,  and  his  Old 
Red  Sandstone  (1841)  made  a  great  addition  to  the  knowledge  of 
fossils.  He  followed  this  up  by  a  great  number  of  other  works, 
some  merely  polemical,  others  descriptive  of  his  own  life  and 
travels.  In  all  the  better  parts  of  Hugh  Miller's  writings  there  is 
a  remarkable  style,  extremely  popular  and  unpretentious,  but  never 
trivial  or  slipshod,  which  is  not  far  below  the  best  styles  of  the 
century  for  its  special  purpose,  though  in  some  respects  it  smacks 
more  of  the  eighteenth,  and  has  a  certain  relation  with  that  of 
White  of  Selborne. 

The  most  considerable  literary  gifts  of  the  century  among  men 
of  science  probably  belonged  to  a  man  more  than  twenty  years 
younger  than  Miller,  and  more  than  fifteen  younger  than  Darwin, 
who  died  in  June  1895,  a^er  a  hT£  normally  full  of  years  and 
almost  abnormally  full  of  activity  and  accomplishment.  Thomas 
Henry  Huxley,  born  in  May  1825,  at  Baling,  studied  medicine, 
and  becoming  a  navy  doctor,  executed  like  Darwin  a  voyage  to 
the  South  Seas.  His  scientific  work,  though  early  distinguished, 
met  with  no  great  encouragement  from  the  Admiralty,  and  he  left 
the  service,  though  he  held  many  public  appointments  in  later 
life.  He  became  F.R.S.  at  six-and-twenty,  and  from  that  time 
onwards  till  his  sixtieth  year  he  was  a  busy  professor,  lecturer, 
member  of  commissions,  and  (for  a  time)  inspector  of  fisheries. 
In  the  ever  greater  and  greater  specialising  of  science  which  has 
taken  place,  Huxley  was  chiefly  a  morphologist.  But  outside  the 
range  of  special  studies  he  was  chiefly  known  as  a  vigorous 
champion  of  Darwinism  and  a  something  more  than  vigorous 
aggressor  in  the  cause  of  Agnosticism  (a  word  which  he  himself  did 
much  to  spread),  attacking  supernaturalism  of  every  kind,  and 
(though  disclaiming  materialism  and  not  choosing  to  call  himself  an 
atheist)  unceasingly  demanding  that  all  things  should  submit  them- 


436  SCHOLARSHIP  AND  SCIENCE  CHAP,  x 

selves  to  naturalist  criticism.  A  great  number  of  brilliant  essays 
and  lectures  were  composed  by  him  on  different  parts  of  what  may 
be  called  the  debateable  land  between  science,  philosophy,  and 
theology.  And  one  of  his  most  characteristic  and  masterly  single 
studies  was  a  little  book  on  Hume,  contributed  to  the  series 
of  "  English  Men  of  Letters  "  in  1879. 

This  varied,  copious,  and  brilliant  polemic  may  or  may  not 
have  been  open  in  substance  to  the  charge  which  the  bolder  and 
more  thoroughgoing  defenders  of  orthodoxy  brought  against  it, 
that  it  committed  the  logical  error  of  demanding  submission  on 
the  part  of  supernaturalism  to  laws  and  limits  to  which,  by  its  very 
essence,  supernaturalism  disclaimed  allegiance ;  but  the  form  of 
it  was  excellent.  Mr.  Huxley  had  read  much,  and  had  borrowed 
weapons  and  armour  from  more  than  one  Schoolman  and  Father 
as  well  as  from  purely  profane  authors.  He  had  an  admirable 
style,  free  alike  from  the  great  faults  of  his  contemporaries, 
"  preciousness  "  and  slipshodness,  and  a  knack  of  crisp  but  not  too 
mannered  phrase  recalling  that  of  Swift  or,  still  more,  of  Bentley. 
It  has  been  said,  with  some  truth  as  well  as  with  some  paradox, 
that  a  literary  critic  of  the  very  first  class  was  lost  in  him,  at 
the  salvage  only  of  some  scientific  monographs,  which  like  all 
their  kind  will  be  antiquated  some  day,  and  of  some  polemics  which 
must  suffer  equally  from  the  touch  of  time. 


CHAPTER   XI 

DRAMA 

AT  no  period,  probably,  in  the  history  of  English  literature,  from 
the  sixteenth  century  until  that  with  which  we  are  now  dealing, 
would  it  have  been  possible  to  compress  the  history  of  the  drama 
during  a  hundred  years  into  the  space  in  which  it  is  here  proposed 
to  give  it.  If  we  were  dealing  with  the  works  of  living  men  the 
historian  might  be  justly  charged  with  arrogant  incompetence  in  not 
taking  more  notice  of  them.  But,  fortunately,  that  is  not  the  case  ; 
and  the  brevity  of  the  treatment  is  equally  compatible  with  a  belief 
that  the  plays  of  the  present  day  are  masterpieces,  and  with  a  sus- 
picion that  they  are  not.  As  to  the  past  we  have,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  a  few  protesters,  general  consent  that  the  English  drama  of 
the  nineteenth  century  has  displayed  one  curious  and  disastrous 
characteristic.  The  plays,  as  a  rule,  which  have  been  good  litera- 
ture have  either  never  been  acted  or  have  seldom  succeeded  as 
plays ;  the  plays  that  have  been  acted  and  have  been  successful 
have  seldom  been  good  literature. 

The  best  idea  of  the  state  of  the  drama  between  1790  and 
1810  may  perhaps  be  obtained  by  any  one  who  cares  to  look 
through — it  would  require  a  monomania,  a  desert  island,  or  at 
least  a  succession  of  wet  days  in  a  country  inn  to  enable  any  one 
to  read  through — the  ten  volumes  of  Mrs.  Inchbald's  Modern 
British  Theatre,  printed  in  1811  "from  the  prompt-books  of  the 
Theatres  Royal."  This  publication,  supplementing  the  larger 


43,8  DRAMA  CHAP. 

British  Theatre  of  the  same  editor,  contains  more  than  two 
volumes  of  the  works  of  Frederick  Reynolds,  a  prolific  play- 
wright who  was  responsible  for  the  English  version  of  Werther  in 
drama ;  another  of  Mrs.  Inchbald's  own  writing  and  adaptation ; 
one  of  Holcroft's  later  works  ;  one  of  Cumberland's ;  the  rest  being 
made  up  of  lesser  pieces  by  Colman  the  younger,  Dibdin,  and 
others,  serious  plays  in  blank  verse  such  as  Hannah  More's 
Percy,  and  the  Honourable  John  St.  John's  Mary  Queen  of  Scots, 
etc.  More  than  one  of  these  was  a  person  of  talent,  more  than 
one  a  person  even  of  very  great  talent ;  while  Holcroft  and 
Colman,  if  not  others,  had  displayed  special  ability  for  drama. 
Yet  there  is,  perhaps,  in  the  fifty  plays  of  the  ten  volumes  only 
one  that  can  be  called  a  good  play,  only  one  which  is  readable, 
and  that  is  the  Trip  to  Scarborough,  which  Sheridan  simply  adapted, 
which  he  did  little  more  than  edit,  from  Vanbrugh's  Relapse. 
Outside  these  volumes  the  acting  drama  of  the  period  may  be  best 
studied  in  the  other  and  better  work  of  the  pair  just  mentioned, 
and  in  O'Keefe. 

John  O'Keefe,  or  O'Keeffe  (for  the  name  is  spelt  both  ways), 
was  a  very  long-lived  man,  who  was  born  at  Dublin  in  1748  and 
died  at  Southampton  in  1833.  But  in  the  later  years  of  his 
life  he  suffered  from  blindness ;  and  the  period  of  his  greatest 
dramatic  activity  almost  exactly  coincided  with  that  of  our  first 
chapter.  He  is  said  to  have  written  some  fifty  pieces,  of  various 
kinds,  between  1781  and  1798;  and  in  the  latter  year  he  published 
a  collection  of  about  thirty,  referring  in  the  preface  to  others  which 
"  an  inconsiderate  disposal  of  the  copyright "  prevented  him  from 
including.  O'Keefe  was  to  a  certain  extent  a  follower  of  Foote;  but 
his  pieces — though  he  was  a  practised  actor — depended  less  upon 
his  own  powers  of  exposition  than  Foote's.  They  range  from  rather 
farcical  comedies  to  pure  farces  and  comediettas  much  interspersed 
with  songs  for  music ;  and  their  strictly  literary  merit  is  not  often 
great,  while  for  sheer  extravagance  they  require  the  utmost  license 
of  the  boards  to  excuse  them.  There  is,  however,  something 
much  more  taking  in  them  than  in  most  of  the  dramatic  work  of 


JOANNA  BAILLIE  439 


the  time.  For  instance,  the  "wild  farce"  (referred  to  but  not 
named  by  Lamb  in  his  paper  on  Munden)  of  The  Merry  Mourners^ 
though  as  "  improbable  "  as  Mrs.  Barbauld  thought  The  Ancient 
Mariner  to  be,  has  a  singular  hustle  and  bustle  of  sustained 
interest,  and  not  a  few  shrewd  strokes  such  as  the  following, 
which  perhaps  does  not  only  apply  to  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  "  Your  London  ladies  are  so  mannified  with  their  switch 
rattans  and  coats,  and  watch-chain  nibbities,  and  their  tip -top 
hats  and  their  cauliflower  cravats,  that,  ecod  !  there's  no  mark  of 
their  being  women  except  the  petticoat."  The  Castle  of  Anda- 
lusia (1782)  is  an  early  and  capital  example  of  the  bandit 
drama,  and  The  Poor  Soldier  of  the  Irish  comic  opera.  Wild 
Oats  supplied  favourite  parts  to  the  actors  of  the  time  in 
Rover  and  Ephraim  Smooth ;  and,  with  a  little  good  will,  one 
may  read  even  slight  things  like  A  Beggar  on  Horseback  and 
The  Doldrum  with  some  amusement.  But  O'Keefe  has  few  gifts 
beyond  knowledge  of  the  stage,  Irish  shrewdness,  Irish  rattle,  and 
an  honest,  straightforward  simplicity  ;  and  that  one  turns  to  him 
from  other  dramatists  of  the  period  with  some  relief,  is  even  more 
to  their  discredit  than  to  his  credit. 

A  curious  and  early  fruit  of  this  gradual  divorce  between  drama 
and  literature  was  Joanna  Baillie,  a  lady  whose  virtues,  amiability, 
and  in  a  way  talents,  caused  her  to  be  spoken  of  by  her  own  con- 
temporaries with  an  admiration  which  posterity  has  found  it  hard 
to  echo  as  concerns  her  strictly  literary  position  in  drama — some  of 
her  shorter  poems  were  good.  She  was  born  in  1762  at  Bothwell, 
of  a  good  Scotch  family,  and  her  mother  was  a  sister  of  the  great 
surgeon  Hunter.  This  gift  descended  to  her  elder  brother 
Matthew,  who  was  very  famous  in  his  own  day  as  an  anatomist 
and  physician.  Partly  to  be  near  him,  Joanna  and  her  sister 
Agnes  established  themselves  at  Hampstead,  where  she  often 
entertained  Scott  and  other  great  people,  and  where  she  lived  till 
23rd  February  1851.  In  1798  she  published  the  first  of  a  series  of 
Plays  on  the  Passions,  in  which  the  eighteenth  century  theory  of  the 
ruling  passion  was  carried  out  to  the  uncompromising  and  even 


440  DRAMA  CHAP. 

whimsical  extent  of  supplying  a  brace  of  dramas,  a  tragedy  and  a 
comedy,  on  each  of  the  stronger  passions,  Hatred,  Fear,  Love,  etc. 
The  first  volume,  which  opened  with  the  rather  striking  closet  drama 
of  Basil,  sometimes  spoken  of  as  Count  Basil,  was  prefaced  by  an 
introductory  discourse  of  considerable  ability.  The  book,  coming 
at  a  dead  season  of  literature,  was  well  received.  It  reached  its 
third  edition  in  the  second  year  from  its  appearance,  and  one  of 
its  plays,  De  Montfort,  was  acted,  with  Kemble  in  the  title  part,  not 
without  success.  A  second  volume  followed  in  1802,  and  a  third  in 
1812.  In  1804  one  of  Miscellaneous  Plays  had  been  issued,  while 
others  and  some  poems  were  added  later.  Joanna's  plays  in  general, 
it  was  admitted,  would  not  act  (though  the  Ettrick  Shepherd  in 
the  Nodes  Ambrosiana  denies  this),  and  it  requires  some  effort  to 
read  them.  The  blank  verse  of  the  tragedies,  though  respectable, 
is  uninspired  ;  the  local  and  historical  colour,  whether  of  Byzantine, 
Saxon,  or  Renaissance  times,  is  of  that  fatal  "property"  character 
which  has  been  noticed  in  the  novel  before  Scott ;  and  the  passion- 
scheme  is  obviously  inartistic.  The  comedies  are  sometimes 
genuinely  funny  ;  but  they  do  not  display  either  the  direct  and  fresh 
observation  of  manners,  or  the  genial  creation  of  character,  which 
alone  can  make  comedy  last.  In  short  Miss  Baillie  was  fortunate 
in  the  moment  of  her  appearance,  but  she  cannot  be  called  either 
a  great  dramatist  or  a  good  one. 

The  school  of  Artificial  Tragedy — the  phrase,  though  not  a 
consecrated  one,  is  as  legitimate  as  that  of  artificial  comedy — 
which  sprung  up  soon  after  the  beginning  of  this  century,  and 
which  continued  during  its  first  half  or  thereabouts,  if  not  later, 
is  a  curious  phenomenon  in  English  history,  and  has  hardly  yet 
received  the  attention  it  deserves.  The  tragedy  of  the  eighteenth 
century  is  almost  beneath  contempt,  being  for  the  most  part 
pale  French  echo  or  else  transpontine  melodrama,  with  a  few 
plaster -cast  attempts  to  reproduce  an  entirely  misunderstood 
Shakespeare.  It  was  impossible  that  the  Romantic  movement  in 
itself,  and  the  study  of  the  Elizabethan  drama  which  it  induced, 
jhould  not  lead  to  the  practice  of  tragedy,  while  the  existence  of 


441 


the  Kembles  as  players  and  managers,  might  be  thought  to 
promise  well  for  the  tragic  stage. 

Yet  there  has  always  been  something  out  of  joint  with 
English  nineteenth  century  tragedy.  Of  Lamb's  John  Woodvil 
and  Godwin's  Antonio  mention  has  been  made.  Byron's  tragedies 
are  indeed  by  no  means  the  worst  part  of  his  work ;  but  they  also 
shared  the  defects  of  that  work  as  poetry,  and  they  were  not 
eminently  distinguished  for  acting  qualities.  Scott  had  no  dramatic 
faculty ;  Shelley's  Cenci,  despite  its  splendid  poetry,  is  not 
actable ;  indeed  the  only  one  of  the  great  English  nineteenth- 
century  Pleiade  who  was  successful  on  the  stage  was  Coleridge ; 
and  Remorse  and  Zapolya  are  not  masterpieces. 

Yet  the  fascination  of  the  theatre,  or  at  least  of  the  drama, 
seemed  to  continue  unaltered,  and  the  attempts  on  or  in  it  varied 
from  the  wild  fantasy  pieces  of  Beddoes  (which  no  stage  but  the 
Elizabethan — if  even  that — could  ever  have  welcomed)  to  the 
curious  academic  drama  of  which  types  extend  not  merely  from 
Milman's  Fazio  in  1815  to  Talfourd's  Ion  twenty  years  later,  but 
further  still.  Of  Milman  notice  has  been  taken  in  his  far  truer 
vocation  as  historian.  Talfourd  was  a  good  lawyer,  a  worthy  man, 
and  as  noted  above,  the  friend  and  editor  of  Lamb.  But  his 
tragedies  are  very  cold,  and  it  is  difficult  to  believe  that  Ion  can 
have  had  any  other  attraction  besides  the  popularity  and  skill  of 
Macready,  who  indeed  was  greatly  responsible  for  the  appearance 
both  of  this  and  of  better  plays.  In  particular  he  stood  usher  to 
divers  productions  of  Browning's  which  have  been  mentioned, 
such  as  the  rather  involved  and  impossible  Strajford,  and  the 
intensely  pathetic  but  not  wholly  straightforward  Blot  in  the 
'Scutcheon.  This  last  is  the  one  play  of  the  century  which — with 
a  certain  unsubstantiality  of  matter,  a  defect  almost  total  in  char- 
acter, and  a  constant  provocation  to  the  fatal  question,  "  Why  are 
all  these  people  behaving  in  this  way?" — has  the  actual  tragic 
vis  in  its  central  point. 

The  character,  however,  and  the  condemnation  of  the  English 
drama  of  the  first  half  of  this  century  from  the  literary  point  of 


442  DRAMA  CHAT. 

view,  are  summed  up  in  the  single  statement  that  its  most 
prominent  and  successful  dramatist  was  James  Sheridan  Knowles. 
Born  in  1784,  and  son  of  the  great  Sheridan's  cousin  at  Cork, 
Knowles  was  introduced  to  London  literary  society  pretty  early. 
He  tried  soldiering  (at  least  the  militia)  and  medicine ;  but  his 
bent  towards  the  stage  was  too  strong,  and  he  became  an  actor, 
though  never  a  very  successful  one,  and  a  teacher  of  acting, 
though  never  a  manager.  He  was  about  thirty  when  he  turned 
dramatist,  and  though  his  plays  justify  the  theatrical  maxim  that 
no  one  who  has  not  practical  knowledge  of  the  stage  can  write  a 
good  acting  play,  they  also  justify  the  maxim  of  the  study  that 
in  his  day  literary  excellence  had  in  some  mysterious  way 
obtained  or  suffered  a  divorce  from  dramatic  merit.  Not  that 
these  plays  are  exactly  contemptible  as  literature,  but  that  as 
literature  they  are  not  in  the  least  remarkable.  The  most  famous 
of  his  tragedies  is  Virginias,  which  dates,  as  performed  in  London 
at  least,  from  1820.  It  was  preceded  and  followed  by  others,  of 
which  the  best  are  perhaps  Cains  Gracchus  (1815),  and  William 
Tell  (1834).  His  comedies  have  worn  better,  and  The  Hunch- 
back (1832),  and  the  Lave  Chase  (1836),  are  still  interesting 
examples  of  last- century  artificial  comedy  slightly  refreshed. 
Independently  of  his  technical  knowledge,  Knowles  really  had 
that  knowledge  of  human  nature  without  which  drama  is 
impossible,  and  he  could  write  very  respectable  English.  But 
the  fatal  thing  about  him  is  that  he  is  content  to  dwell  in 
decencies  for  ever.  There  is  no  inspiration  in  him ;  his  style, 
his  verse,  his  theme,  his  character,  his  treatment  are  all  emphati- 
cally mediocre,  and  his  technique  as  a  dramatist  deserves  only  a 
little,  though  a  little,  warmer  praise. 

Better  as  literature,  and  at  least  as  good  as  drama,  are  the 
best  plays  of  the  first  Lord  Lytton,  another  of  the  eminent  hands 
of  Macready,  who  undoubtedly  counted  for  something  in  the 
success  of  The  Lady  of  Lyons,  Richelieu,  and  Money,  the  two  first 
produced  in  1838,  and  the  last  in  1840.  Richelieu  is  the  nearest 
to  Knowles  in  competence  without  excellence,  the  other  two 


XI  BULWER — PLANCH!?;  443 

perhaps  excel  if  not  positively  yet  relatively.  Many  spectators 
quite  recently,  while  unable  to  check  laughter  at  the  grandiloquent 
sentimentality  and  the  stock  situations  of  The  Lady  of  Lyons,  have 
been  unable  to  avoid  being  touched  by  its  real  though  ordinary 
pathos,  and  moved  by  its  astonishing  cleverness ;  while  Money  is 
probably  the  very  best  comic  example  of  the  hybrid  kind  above 
referred  to,  the  modernised  artificial  comedy.  But  Bulwer's  other 
plays,  though  at  least  one,  the  Duchesse  de  la  Valliere,  is  not  bad 
reading,  were  less  fortunate,  and  one  of  them  is  the  subject  of 
perhaps  the  most  successful  of  Thackeray's  early  reviews  in  the 
grotesque  style,  preserved  in  the  Yellowplush  Papers. 

It  will  be  observed  that,  with  the  single  and  not  very  notable 
exception  of  Sheridan  Knowles,  almost  all  the  names  already 
mentioned  are  those  of  persons  to  whom  drama  was  a  mere  by- 
work.  Another  exception  may  be  found  in  James  R.  Planche 
(1796-1880),  a  man  of  no  very  exalted  birth  or  elaborate  educa- 
tion, but  an  archaeologist  of  some  merit,  and  from  1854  onwards 
an  official  representative  of  the  honourable  though  discredited 
science  of  Heraldry  as  Rouge  Croix  Pursuivant  and  Somerset 
Herald.  From  1818  onward  Planche  was  the  author,  adapter, 
translator,  and  what  not,  of  innumerable — they  certainly  run  to 
hundreds — dramatic  pieces  of  every  possible  sort  from  regular 
plays  to  sheer  extravaganzas.  He  was  happiest  perhaps  in  the 
lighter  and  freer  kinds,  having  a  pleasant  and  never  vulgar  style 
of  jocularity,  a  fair  lyrical  gift,  and  the  indefinable  knowledge  of 
what  is  a  play.  But  he  stands  only  on  the  verge  of  literature 
proper,  and  the  propriety,  indeed  the  necessity,  of  including  him 
here  is  the  strongest  possible  evidence  of  the  poverty  of  dramatic 
literature  in  our  period.  It  would  indeed  only  be  possible  to  extend 
this  chapter  much  by  including  men  who  have  no  real  claim  to 
appear,  and  who  would  too  forcibly  suggest  the  hired  guests  of 
story,  introduced  in  order  to  avoid  a  too  obtrusive  confession  of 
the  absence  of  guests  entitled  to  be  present. 

The  greater  and  more  strictly  literary  names  of  those  who 
have  tried  the  stage  in  the  intervals  of  happier  studies,  from  Miss 


444  DRAMA  CHAI>.  xi 

Mitford  and  R.  H.  Home  to  Tennyson,  have  been  mentioned 
elsewhere  ;  and  there  is  no  need  to  return  to  them.  Dr.  James 
Westland  Marston  (1820-1890)  was  once  much  praised,  and  was 
an  author  of  Macready's.  Miss  Isabella  Harwood,  daughter  of 
the  second  editor  of  the  Saturday  Review,  produced  under  the 
pseudonym  of  "  Ross  Neil "  a  series  of  closet-dramas  of  excellent 
composition  and  really  poetical  fancy,  but  wanting  the  one  thing 
needful.  Perhaps  a  few  other  writers  might  with  pains  be 
added ;  and  of  course  every  reviewer  knows  that  the  flow  of 
five -act  tragedies,  though  less  abundant  than  of  old,  has  con- 
tinued. But,  on  the  whole,  the  sentence  already  put  in  more 
than  one  form  remains  true  and  firm — that  in  this  period  the 
dramatic  work  of  those  who  have  been  really  men  and  women 
of  letters  is  generally  far  inferior  to  their  other  work,  and  that, 
with  the  rarest  exceptions,  the  dramatic  work  of  those  who  have 
not  excelled  in  other  kinds  of  literature  is  not  literature  at  all. 


CHAPTER   XII 

CONCLUSION 

A  CONCLUSION  which  avows  that  it  might  almost  as  well  have 
presented  itself  as  a  preface  may  seem  to  be  self-condemned ; 
it  must  be  the  business  of  the  following  pages  to  justify  it.  In 
summing  up  on  such  a  great  matter  as  this  it  is  desirable — it  is 
indeed  necessary — to  indicate,  in  broader  lines  than  at  the  mere 
outset  would  have  seemed  appropriate  or  indeed  possible,  the 
general  course  of  thought  and  of  speech,  of  literary  matter  and 
literary  form,  during  the  century  and  more  which  is  submitted 
to  the  view.  We  can  thus  place  individuals  in  their  position  to 
each  other  and  to  the  whole  more  boldly  and  with  less  reserve ; 
we  can  sketch  the  general  character  of  existing  movements,  the 
movers  in  which  have  been  exempt  from  individual  consideration 
by  virtue  of  their  life  and  work  being  incomplete;  we  can  at 
once  record  accomplishment  and  indicate  tendency. 

The  period  dealt  with  in  the  first  chapter  of  this  book 
illustrates  the  differences  in  appeal  of  such  periods  to  the  merely 
dilettante  and  "  tasting "  critic,  and  to  the  student  of  literature 
in  the  historical  and  comparative  fashion.  To  the  former  it 
is  one  of  the  most  ungrateful  of  all  such  sub-periods  or  sub- 
divisions in  English  literature.  He  finds  in  it  none,  or  at  most 
BoswelPs  Johnson,  Burns,  and  the  Lyrical  Ballads  (this  last  at 
its  extreme  end),  of  the  chief  and  principal  things  on  which 
alone  he  delights  to  fix  his  attention.  Its  better  poetry,  such  as 
that  of  Cowper  and  Crabbe,  he  regards  at  best  with  a  forced 


44fi  CONCLUSION 


esteem;  its  worse  is  almost  below  his  disgust.  Its  fiction  is 
preposterous  and  childish ;  it  contributes  nothing  even  to  the 
less  "  bellettristic "  departments  of  literature  that  is  worth  his 
attention ;  it  is  a  tedious  dead  season  about  which  there  is 
nothing  tolerable  except  the  prospect  of  getting  rid  of  it  before 
very  long. 

To  the  latter — to  the  historical  and  comparative  student — on 
the  other  hand,  it  has  an  interest  of  an  absolutely  unique  kind.  As 
was  observed  in  a  former  volume  of  this  history,  the  other  great 
blossoming  time  of  English  literature — that  which  we  call  Eliza- 
bethan, and  by  which  we  mean  the  last  five-and-twenty  years 
of  the  Queen's  reign  and  the  fifty  or  sixty  after  her  death — was 
preceded  by  no  certain  signs  except  those  of  restless  seeking. 
Here,  on  the  contrary,  with  no  greater  advantage  of  looking  back, 
we  can  see  the  old  fruit  dropping  off  and  the  new  forming,  in  a 
dozen  different  kinds  and  a  hundred  different  ways.  Extrava- 
gance on  one  side  always  provokes  extravagance  on  the  other ; 
and  because  the  impatient  revolt  of  Coleridge  and  some  others 
of  the  actual  leaders  into  the  Promised  Land  chose  to  present  the 
eighteenth  century  as  a  mere  wilderness  in  respect  of  poetry,  en- 
joyment of  nature,  and  so  forth,  there  have  been  of  late  years 
critics  who  maintained  that  the  poetical  decadence  of  that  century 
is  all  a  delusion  ;  in  other  words  (it  may  be  supposed)  that  Aken- 
side  and  Mason  are  the  poetical  equals  of  Herrick  and  Donne. 
The  via  media,  as  almost  always,  is  here  also  the  via  veritatis. 
The  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century  were  poets  ;  but  the  poetical 
stream  did  not,  as  a  rule,  run  very  high  or  strong  in  their 
channels,  and  they  were  tempted  to  make  up  for  the  sluggishness 
and  shallowness  of  the  water  by  playing  rather  artificial  and  rococo 
tricks  with  the  banks.  The  fiction  of  the  eighteenth  century 
was,  at  its  greatest,  equal  to  the  greatest  ever  seen ;  but  it  was  as 
yet  advancing  with  uncertain  steps,  and  had  not  nearly  explored 
its  own  domain.  The  history  of  the  eighteenth  century  had 
returned  to  the  true  sense  of  history,  and  was  endeavouring  to  be 
accurate  ;  but  it  only  once  attained — it  is  true  that  with  Gibbon 


xii  CONCLUSION  447 

it  probably  attained  once  for  all — a  perfect  combination  of  dili- 
gence and  range,  of  matter  and  of  style. 

In  all  these  respects  the  list  might,  if  it  were  proper,  be  ex- 
tended to  much  greater  length.  The  twenty  years  from  1780  to 
1800  show  us  in  the  most  fascinating  manner  the  turn  of  the  tide, 
not  as  yet  coming  in  three  feet  abreast,  rather  creeping  up  by 
tortuous  channels  and  chance  depressions,  but  rising  and  forcing 
a  way  wherever  it  could.  In  the  poets,  major  and  minor,  of  the 
period,  omitting,  and  even  not  wholly  omitting,  Burns  and  Blake 
— who  are  of  no  time  intrinsically,  but  who,  as  it  happens,  belong 
accidentally  to  this  time  as  exponents,  the  one  of  the  refreshing 
influence  of  dialect  and  freedom  from  literary  convention,  the 
other  of  the  refreshing  influence  of  sympathy  with  old  models  and 
mystical  dreaming — all  the  restlessness  of  the  approaching  crisis 
is  seen.  Nothing  in  literature  is  more  interesting  than  to  watch 
the  effect  of  the  half-unconscious  aims  and  desires  of  Cowper  and 
Crabbe,  to  see  how  they  try  to  put  the  new  wine  in  the  old 
bottles,  to  compare  them  with  Goldsmith  and  Thomson  on  the 
one  hand,  with  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  on  the  other.  Hayley 
perhaps  alone,  or  almost  alone,  is  rebel  to  the  comparative 
method.  Hayley  is  one  of  these  hopeless  creatures  who  abound 
at  all  periods,  and  whose  native  cast  of  nothingness  takes  a  faint 
fashion  from  the  time.  But  even  in  the  verse  of  "  Monk  "  Lewis 
we  see  the  itch  for  new  measures,  the  craving  for  lyric  movement ; 
even  in  the  day-flies  of  the  Delia  Crusca  group  the  desire  to  be 
"  something  different."  And  then  in  Bowles,  with  his  sonnets  of 
places,  in  Sayers,  with  his  rhymeless  Pindarics,  we  come  upon  the 
actual  guides  to  the  right  way,  guides  the  oddest,  the  blindest,  the 
most  stumbling,  but  still — as  not  merely  chronology  but  the  posi- 
tive testimony  and  the  still  more  positive  practice  of  those  who 
followed  them  show — real  guides  and  no  misleaders. 

Least  studied,  perhaps,  because  of  its  want  of  positive  savour 
in  comparison  with  their  later  achievements,  but  more  interesting 
than  all  of  these,  is  the  early  work  of  Southey,  Coleridge,  and 
Wordsworth  themselves,  and  the  work,  not  merely  early  but  later, 


448  CONCLUSION 


of  men  like  Rogers  and  Campbell.  Here  the  spectacle  already 
presented  in  Crabbe  and  Cowper  is  repeated ;  but  the  process  is 
in  a  further  stage,  and  the  fermentation  is  determining,  according 
to  the  nature  of  the  fermenting  material.  On  Rogers  it  is  nearly 
powerless ;  in  Campbell  only  in  his  lyrics  does  it  succeed  in 
breaking  up  and  dissolving  the  old  crust ;  in  Southey  the  effect 
is  never  quite  complete ;  in  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  but 
especially  in  Coleridge,  the  leaven  changes  all  the  latter  lump. 
Thenceforward  the  process  is  reversed.  Instead  of  instances  of 
advance  amid  a  mass  of  inertia  or  aimless  wandering  we  have 
instances  of  reaction  amid  a  mass  of  advance.  The  work  of  the 
I  revolutionary  time  is  done ;  the  scholar,  contrary  to  Goethe's 
I  dictum,  has  now  not  merely  to  exercise  himself  but  to  perfect. 

The  phenomena  of  the  time  in  faction  are  of  the  same 
character,  but  they  lead  as  yet  to  no  such  distinct  turn.  The 
tale-telling  of  Beckford  is  like  the  singing  of  Burns,  not  uncoloured 
by  the  time,  but  still  in  the  main  purely  individual ;  the  purpose 
of  the  novels  of  Holcroft,  Godwin,  and  Bage  is  groping  in  the 
dark ;  the  Radcliffian  romance  and  its  exaggeration  by  Lewis 
exhibit  the  same  uncertainty,  the  same  application  of  the  Rule  of 
False.  And  there  is  for  once  a  more  philosophical  and  less 
cowardly  explanation — that  Scott,  the  Joshua  in  this  instance,  as 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  were  in  the  other,  was  occupied  else- 
where before  he  sought  the  Palestine  of  the  novel.  For  it  must 
be  remembered  that  prose  fiction,  though  it  had  been  cultivated 
in  a  scattered  and  tentative  way  for  thousands  of  years,  was  up  to 
this  time  the  most  inorganic  of  literary  kinds.  Poets,  when  they 
chose  to  give  themselves  up  to  poetry  and  to  turn  their  backs  on 
convention,  were  almost  as  well  off  then  as  now.  They  had  but 
to  open  the  great  Greeks  of  the  fifth  and  fourth  centuries  before 
Christ,  the  Latins  such  as  Lucretius  and  Catullus,  the  great 
mediaeval,  the  great  Renaissance  examples  of  their  own  art,  to  see, 
as  soon  as  they  chose  to  see,  where  and  how  to  go  right.  The 
adventurer  in  fiction  was  destitute  of  any  such  assistance.  Only 
a  few  examples  of  much  real  excellence  in  his  art  were  before 


xn  CONCLUSION  449 


him ;  many  of  those  existing  (including  most  of  the  medi- 
aeval instances)  were  hardly  before  him  at  all ;  and  none  of  these, 
with  the  exception  of  the  eighteenth  century  novel  of  manners 
and  character  (which,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  was  at  that  special 
time  the  last  thing  he  wanted  to  imitate),  and  the  short  tale  of 
France  and  Italy,  could  be  said  to  have  been  brought  to  anything 
like  perfection.  Hence  the  wanderings  and  the  stumblings  here 
were  far  greater,  the  touch  of  the  groping  hands  far  feebler  and 
less  sure  than  even  in  poetry ;  but  the  crying  for  the  light  was 
there  too,  and  it  was  to  be  heard  in  time.  Even  as  it  was,  before 
the  century  closed,  Miss  Edgeworth  had  given  important  new 
lines  to  fiction,  and  was  on  the  eve  of  opening  the  most  fertile  of 
all  its  seams  or  veins,  that  of  national  or  provincial  character; 
the  purpose- novel  just  referred  to  was  full  of  future,  though  it 
might  be  a  future  of  a  perilous  and  disputable  kind ;  the  terror- 
romance,  subdued  to  saner  limits  and  informed  with  greater 
knowledge  and  greater  genius,  was  not  soon  to  cease  out  of  the 
land ;  and,  a  detail  not  to  be  neglected,  the  ever  increasing  popu- 
larity of  the  novel  was  making  it  more  and  more  certain  that  it 
would  number  good  intellects  sooner  or  later. 

In  all  other  directions,  with  the  single  exception  of  drama, 
in  which  there  was  neither  performance  nor  promise,  so  far  as 
literature  was  concerned,  to  any  great  extent,  the  same  restless- 
ness of  effort,  and  not  always  the  same  incompetence  of  result 
was  seen.  The  fact  of  the  revolutionary  war  abroad,  and  the 
coercive  policy  thereby  necessitated  at  home,  may  have  somewhat 
postponed  the  appearance  of  the  new  kind  of  periodical,  in  all 
shapes  from  quarterly  to  daily,  which  was  to  be  so  great  a  feature 
of  the  next  age ;  but  the  same  causes  increased  the  desire  for  it 
and  prepared  not  a  few  of  its  constituents.  It  is  impossible  for 
any  tolerably  careful  reader  not  to  notice  how  much  more 
"modern,"  to  use  an  unphilosophical  but  indispensable  term,  is 
the  political  satire  both  in  verse  and  prose,  which  has  been  noticed 
in  the  first  chapter  of  this  book,  than  the  things  of  more  or  less 
the  same  kind  that  immediately  preceded  it.  It  was  an  accident, 

2  G 


45°  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

no  doubt,  that  made  the  Anti-Jacobin  ridicule  Darwin's  caricature 
of  eighteenth  century  style  in  poetry ;  yet  that  ridicule  did  far 
more  to  put  this  particular  convention  out  of  fashion  than  all  the 
attacks  of  the  same  paper  on  innovators  like  Coleridge  (who  at  that 
time  had  hardly  attempted  their  literary  innovations)  could  do 
harm.  The  very  interest  in  foreign  affairs,  brought  about  by  the 
most  universal  war  that  had  ever  been  known,  helped  to  introduce 
the  foreign  element  which  was  to  play  so  large  a  part  in  literature ; 
and  little  affection  as  the  critic  may  have  for  the  principles  of 
Godwin  or  of  Paine,  he  cannot  deny  that  the  spirit  of  inquiry,  the 
rally  and  shock  of  attack  and  defence,  are  things  a  great  deal 
better  for  literature  than  a  placid  contentment  with  accepted 
conventions. 

Theology  indeed  may  share  with  drama  the  reproach  of  having 
very  little  that  is  good  to  show  from  this  time,  or  indeed  for  a  long 
time  to  come.  For  the  nonconformist  sects  and  the  Low  Church 
party,  which  had  resulted  from  the  Evangelical  movement  in 
the  earlier  eighteenth  century,  were,  the  Unitarians  excepted,  for 
the  most  part  illiterate.  The  Deist  controversy  had  ceased,  or, 
as  conducted  against  Paine,  required  no  literary  skill ;  and  the 
High  Church  movement  had  not  begun.  Philosophy,  not  pro- 
ductive of  very  much,  was  more  active ;  and  the  intensely  alien 
and  novel  styles  of  German  thought  were  certain  in  time  to  pro- 
duce their  effect,  while  their  working  was  in  exact  line  with  all  the 
other  tendencies  we  have  been  surveying. 

In  short,  during  these  twenty  years,  literature  in  almost  all  its 
parts  was  being  thoroughly  "boxed  about."  The  hands  that 
stirred  it  were  not  of  the  strongest  as  yet,  they  were  absolutely 
unskilled,  and  for  the  most  part  they  had  not  even  any  very  clear 
conception  of  what  they  wanted  to  do.  But  almost  everybody 
felt  that  something  had  to  be  done,  and  was  anxious — even 
childishly  anxious — to  do  something.  It  by  no  means  always 
happens  that  such  anxiety  is  rewarded  or  is  a  good  sign ;  but  it  is 
always  a  noteworthy  one,  and  in  this  instance  there  is  no  doubt 
about  either  the  fact  of  the  reward  or  its  goodness. 


xii  CONCLUSION  451 

The  subsequent  history  of  poetry  during  the  century  divides 
itself  in  an  exceedingly  interesting  way,  which  has  not  perhaps  yet 
been  subjected  to  full  critical  comment.  There  are  in  it  five 
pretty  sharply  marked  periods  of  some  ten  or  fifteen  years  each, 
which  are  distinguished,  the  first,  third,  and  fifth,  by  the  appear- 
ance in  more  or  less  numbers  of  poets  of  very  high  merit,  and  of 
characteristics  more  or  less  distinctly  original;  the  second  and 
fourth  by  poetic  growths,  not  indeed  scanty  in  amount  and  some- 
times exquisite  in  quality,  but  tentative,  fragmentary,  and  un- 
decided. It  will  of  course  be  understood  that  in  this,  as  in  all 
literary  classifications,  mathematical  accuracy  must  not  be  ex- 
pected, and  that  the  lives  of  many  of  the  poets  mentioned  neces- 
sarily extend  long  before  and  after  the  periods  which  their  poetical 
production  specially  distinguishes.  In  fact  the  life  of  Wordsworth 
covers  as  nearly  as  possible  the  whole  five  sub-periods  mentioned, 
reckoning  from  his  own  birth-year  to  that  of  almost  the  youngest 
of  the  poets,  of  whom  we  shall  here  take  account.  And  perhaps 
there  are  few  better  ways  of  realising  the  extraordinary  eminence 
of  English  nineteenth  century  poetry  than  by  observing,  that  during 
these  eighty  years  there  was  never  a  single  one  at  which  more 
or  fewer  persons  were  not  in  existence,  who  had  produced  or 
were  to  produce  poetry  of  the  first  class.  And  the  more  the 
five -fold  division  indicated  is  examined  and  analysed  the  more 
curious  and  interesting  will  its  phenomena  appear. 

The  divisions  or  batches  of  birth-years  are  worth  indicating 
separately: — The  first  comprises  the  eighth  and  ninth  decades 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  from  the  birth  of  Scott  and  the  Lakers 
to  that  of  Shelley,  with  Keats  as  a  belated  and  so  to  speak  post- 
humous but  most  genuine  child  of  it ;  the  second  covers  about 
fifteen  years  from  the  birth  of  George  Darley,  who  was  of  the  same 
year  (1795)  with  Keats,  to  the  eve  of  that  of  Tennyson ;  the  third 
goes  from  1810  or  thereabouts,  throwing  back  to  include  the 
elder  Tennysons  and  Mrs.  Browning ;  the  fourth  extends  from 
about  1825  to  1836;  the  fifth  from  the  birth  of  Mr.  Morris 
(throwing  back  as  before  to  admit  Rossetti)  to  about  1850. 


452  CONCLUSION 

In  the  first  of 


these  we  see  the.  Romantic  rpvnlt  nr 


whichever  word  may  be  preferred,  growing  up  under  the  joint 
influences  of  the  opening  of  mediaeval  and  foreign  literatureV  of 
the  excitement  of  the  wars  of  the  French  Revolution  ;  of  the  more 
hidden  but  perhaps  more  potent  force'Uf-aimple-  tbb-  and  -flow 
which  governs  the  world  in  all  things,  though  some  fondly  call  it 
Progress  ;  and  of  the  even  more  mysterious  chance  or  choice, 
which  from  time  to  time  brings  into  the  world,  generally  in  groups, 
persons  suited  to  effect  the  necessary  changes.  The  "  Return  to 
Nature,"  or  to  be  less  question-begging  let  us  say  the  taking  up  of  a 
new  standpoint  in  regard  to  nature,  made  half  unconsciously  by  men 
like  Cowper  and  Crabbe,  assisted  without  intending  it  by  men  like 
Burns  and  Blake,  effected  in  intention  if  not  in  full  achievement 
by  feeble  but  lucky  pioneers  like  Bowles,  asserts  itself  once  for  all 
in  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  and  then  works  itself  out  in  different  —  in 
almost  all  possibly  different  —  ways  through  the  varying  administra- 
tion of  the  same  spirit  by  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  Shelley  and 
Keats,  in  the  highest  and  primary  rank,  by  Scott  and  Byron  in  the 
next,  by  Southey,  Campbell,  Leigh  Hunt,  Moore,  and  others  in  the 
third.  And  it  is  again  most  interesting  to  watch  how  the  exertion 
of  influence  and  the  character  of  it  are  by  no  means  in  proportion 
to  the  exact  poetical  strength  of  the  agent.  Scott  and  Byron, 
certainly  inferior  as  poets  to  the  first  four  mentioned,  have  prob- 
ably had  a  greater  bulk  of  poetical  influence  and  poetical  action  on 
mankind  at  large,  and  a  vastly  earlier,  more  immediate  and  more 
sweeping  influence  on  other  poets  than  their  undoubted  betters. 
Leigh  Hunt,  a  poet  quite  of  the  third  rank,  exercised  directly  and 
indirectly,  through  Shelley  and  Keats,  an  influence  on  the  form  of 
poetry,  on  metre,  cadence,  phrase,  greater  than  any  of  the  others, 
save  Wordsworth  and  Byron,  and  perhaps  more  than  these. 
In  all  ways,  however,  by  this  channel  and  that,  in  straightforward 
or  stealthy  fashion,  the  poetic  flood  comes  up,  and  by  the  death 
of  Byron,  Shelley  and  Keats  having  still  more  prematurely  gone 
before,  it  is  at  its  very  highest  spring.  Six-and-twenty  years 
passed,  from  1798  to  1824,  from  the  time  when  the  Lyrical 


CONCLUSION  453 


Ballads  were  brought  out  to  take  their  chance  to  the  time  when 
Mr.  Beddoes,  Mr.  Procter,  and  somebody  else  clubbed  to  publish 
Shelley's  posthumous  poems  at  their  own  expense  or  at  least 
guarantee,  and  justly  objected  to  paying  for  more  than  250  copies, 
because  more  were  not  likely  to  be  sold.  In  these  six-and-twenty 
years  such  an  addition  had  been  made  to  English  poetry  as  five 
times  the  space  had  not  previously  seen,  as  perhaps  was  not  far 
from  equalling  the  glorious  gains  of  a  not  very  different  though 
somewhat  longer  space  of  time  between  the  appearance  of  the 
Shepherd's  Calendar  and  the  death  of  Shakespeare. 

But  the  sequel  of  this  abnormally  high  tide  is  hardly  less  in- 
teresting than  itself.  We  generally  expect  at  such  moments  in 
literature  either  a  decided  falling  off,  or  else  a  period  of  decent 
imitation,  of  "school  work."  It  would  be  absurd  to  say  that 
there  is  no  contrast,  no  falling  off,  and  no  imitation  in  the  group 
of  poets  noticed  at  the  end  of  the  second  chapter  in  this  volume. 
But  they  are  not  utterly  decadent,  and  they  are  by  no  means 
purely  or  merely  imitative.  On  the  contrary,  their  note  is  quite 
different  from  that  of  mere  school  work,  and  in  a  sort  of  eccentric 
and  spasmodic  fashion  they  attain  to  singular  excellence.  Hood, 
Praed,  Macaulay,  Taylor,  Barley,  Beddoes,  Hartley  Coleridge, 
Home,  are  not  to  Wordsworth  or  Coleridge,  to  Byron  or  to  Shelley, 
what  the  later  so-called  Elizabethan  playwrights  are  to  Jonson 
and  Fletcher,  the  later  poets  of  the  same  time  to  Spenser  and 
Donne.  But  they  almost  all,  perhaps  all,  seem  forced  to  turn 
into  some  bye-way  or  backwater  of  poetry,  to  be  unable  or  un- 
willing to  keep  the  crown  of  the  causeway,  the  flood  of  the  tide. 
Hood  and  Praed  —  the  former  after  actually  attempting  great 
poetry,  and  coming  nearer  to  it  than  some  great  poets  come  in 
their  first  attempts — wander  into  the  special  borderland  of  humor- 
ous and  grotesque  verse,  achieving  in  different  parts  of  it  some- 
thing not  unlike  absolute  and  unsurpassed  success.  Beddoes, 
and  to  some  extent  Darley,  adopt  fantastic  varieties,  grim  in  the 
former's  hands,  playful  chiefly  in  the  latter's,  but  alike  remote 
from  everyday  interests  and  broad  appeals  ;  while  the  incompar- 


454  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

able  lyrics  of  Beddoes  are  of  no  special  time  or  school,  their  very 
Elizabethanism  being  somewhat  delusive.  Taylor  and  Home 
attempt  the  serious  moral  play  with  hardly  any  stage  purposes  or 
possibilities,  and  Home  in  Orion  tries  an  eccentric  kind  of  ethical 
or  satirical  epic.  Macaulay — the  most  prominent  of  all,  and  the 
most  popular  in  his  tastes  and  aims — is  perhaps  the  nearest  to  a 
"  schoolman,"  adapting  Scott  as  he  does  in  his  Lays ;  yet  even 
here  there  is  no  mere  imitation. 

Thus  the  people  of  this  minor  transition  exhibit — in  a  most 
interesting  way,  rendered  even  more  interesting  by  the  repetition 
of  it  which,  as  we  have  seen  and  shall  see,  came  about  twenty 
years  later — the  mixed  phenomena  of  an  after-piece  and  a  lever 
de  rideau,  of  precursorship  and  what  we  must  for  want  of  a  better 
word  call  decadence.  They  were  not  strong  enough  in  them- 
selves, or  were  not  favourably  enough  circumstanced,  entirely  to 
refresh  or  redirect  the  main  current  of  poetry ;  so  they  deviated 
from  it.  But  hardly  in  the  least  of  them  is  there  absent  the  sign 
and  symptom  of  the  poetic  spirit  being  still  about,  of  the  poetic 
craft  still  in  full  working  order.  And  their  occasional  efforts, 
their  experiments  in  the  half-kinds  they  affected,  have  a  curious 
charm.  English  poetry  would  be  undeniably  poorer  without  the 
unearthly  snatches  of  Beddoes,  the  exquisitely  urbane  verse-of- 
society  of  Praed,  the  pathetic-grotesque  of  Hood,  even  the  stately 
tirades  of  Home  and  Taylor.  Some  of  them,  if  not  all,  may  at 
this  or  that  time  have  been  exaggerated  in  value,  by  caprice,  by 
reaction,  by  mere  personal  sympathy.  But  no  universal  critic 
will  refuse  admiration  to  them  in  and  for  themselves. 

In  the  next  stage  we  are  again  face  to  face,  not  with  half- 
talents,  uncertain  of  their  direction,  but  with  whole  genius,  inevit- 
ably working  on  its  predestined  lines.  Nothing  quite  like  the 
poetical  career  and  the  poetical  conception  of  Alfred  Tennyson 
and  of  Robert  Browning,  so  different  in  all  respects,  except  that 
of  duration  and  coincidence  in  time,  meets  us  in  English,  perhaps 
nothing  similar  meets  us  in  any  literature.  It  is  easy  to  overesti- 
mate both  ;  and  both  have  been  overestimated.  It  is  still  easier 


CONCLUSION  455 


to  depreciate  both ;  and  both  have  been  depreciated.  Both  wrote 
constantly,  and  at  frequent  intervals,  for  some  sixty  years — the 
same  sixty  years — and,  with  not  more  than  fair  allowance  for  the 
effects  of  time,  both  wrote  at  the  end  better  than  at  the  beginning, 
and  nearly  as  well  as  at  the  best  time  of  each.  Wordsworth,  it  is 
true,  wrote  for  nearly  as  long,  but  no  one  can  assert  the  same 
duration  of  equality  in  his  production. 

In  a  certain  sense,  no  doubt,  neither  can  claim  the  same 
distinct  individuality,  the  same  unmistakable  and  elementary 
quality,  as  that  which  distinguishes  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Shake- 
speare, Wordsworth,  Shelley.  The  work  of  each  is  always  at  once 
recognisable  by  any  tolerably  competent  judge  ;  but  the  signs  of 
identity  are  more  composite  than  atomic,  more  derived  and 
literary  than  essentially  native.  Browning's  unconventional 
mannerisms,  and  his  wide  range  of  subject,  have  made  him  seem 
even  less  of  a  mere  scholar  than  Tennyson ;  but,  as  a  fact,  each  is 
independent  enough  to  a  certain  extent  and  to  a  certain  extent 
only.  In  both  appears,  perhaps  for  the  first  time,  certainly  for 
the  first  time  in  combination  with  distinct  original  genius,  that 
indebtedness  to  the  past,  that  relapse  upon  it  in  the  very  act  of 
forming  vast  schemes  for  the  future,  which  is  more  the  note  of  the 
nineteenth  century  than  anything  else.  They  not  merely  have  all 
literature  and  all  history  behind  them  ;  but  they  know  it.  Yet 
this  knowledge  does  not  weigh  on  them.  They  do  not  exactly 
neglect  it  as  Wordsworth  and  Shelley  were  still  able  to  do,  but 
they  keep  it  under.  It  is  the  attendant  fiend  for  which  they  must 
find  work,  but  which  they  never,  as  too  many  of  their  contempor- 
aries and  followers  have  done,  allow  to  become  their  master. 
And  so  these  two,  as  it  seems  to  me,  do  actually  win  their  way  to 
the  first  class,  not  perhaps  to  the  absolutely  first  division  of  it,  but 
to  a  first  class  still  pretty  rigidly  limited. 

It  is  not  the  object  of  this  Conclusion  to  deal  with  the  perform- 
ances of  individuals  at  any  length,  and  therefore  I  must  refer  back 
to  the  text  for  a  detailed  indication  of  the  position  of  Keats  as  the 
summer-up  of  the  tradition  of  the  first  of  the  groups  or  periods  here 


456  CONCLUSION 


noticed,  and  the  begetter,  master,  and  teacher  of  the  third,  as 
well  as  for  descriptions  of  the  different  manners  in  which  Tenny- 
son and  Browning  respectively  shared  and  distributed  between 
themselves  that  catholic  curiosity  in  poetical  subject,  that  explora- 
tion of  all  history  and  art  and  literature,  which  is  the  main  character- 
istic of  strictly  nineteenth  century  poetry.  But  it  is  very  pertinent 
here  to  point  out  the  remarkable  way  in  which  these  two  poets, 
from  the  unexampled  combination  of  length  and  potency  in  their 
poetical  period  of  influence,  governed  all  the  poetry  that  has 
followed  them.  We  shall  now  see  that  under  their  shadow  at 
least  two  well-marked  groups  arose,  each  of  magnitude  and 
individuality  sufficient  to  justify  the  assignment  to  it  of  a  separate 
position.  Yet  it  was  in  their  shadow  that  these  rose  and  flourished, 
and  though  the  trees  themselves  have  at  length  fallen,  the  shadow 
of  their  names  is  almost  as  great  as  ever. 

The  first  of  these  two  groups,  the  fourth  of  our  present  classifi- 
cation, renews,  as  has  been  said  before,  the  features  of  its  twenty 
or  thirty  years  older  forerunner,  the  group  between  Keats  and 
Tennyson,  in  a  most  curious  and  attractive  fashion.  Once  more 
we  find  the  notes  of  uncertainty,  of  straying  into  paths, — not  always 
quite  blind-alleys,  but  bye-paths  certainly, — the  presence  of  isolated 
burst  and  flash,  of  effort  unsuccessful  or  unequal  as  a  whole.  But 
here  we  find,  what  in  the  earlier  chapter  or  section  we  do  not 
find,  distinct  imitativeness  and  positive  school-following.  This 
imitation,  attempting  Shelley  at  times  with  little  success  (for,  let 
it  be  repeated,  Shelley  is  not  imitable),  selected  in  regular  chrono- 
logical order,  three  masters,  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  and  Browning, 
though  in  each  stage  the  master  of  the  preceding  rather  shared 
than  yielded  his  chair.  It  has  been  said  in  a  famous  passage 
that  Wordsworth  was  more  read  between  1830  and  1840  than  at 
any  time  before  or  since,  and  this  may  perhaps  be  true.  But  his 
influence  on  writers  has  not  depended  on  his  popularity  with 
readers,  and  from  Sir  Aubrey  de  Vere,  who  was  born  more  than 
a  century  ago,  to  verse-writers  who  have  only  just  published,  his 
unmistakable  tone,  the  lone  which,  so  far  as  we  can  see.  would 


xil  CONCLUSION  457 

never  have  been  if  Wordsworth  had  never  existed,  shows  itself. 
The  writing  influence  of  Tennyson  did  not  begin  till  the  issue  of 
the  Poems  of  1842,  but  it  began  almost  immediately  then,  and  has 
remained  in  full  force  to  the  century's  end.  It  is  an  influence 
somewhat  more  external  and  technical  than  Wordsworth's,  but  for 
that  reason  even  more  unmistakable,  and  some  of  its  results  are 
among  the  most  curious  of  school-copies  in  literature.  As  for 
Browning,  imitation  there  tried  both  the  outside  and  the  inside, 
not  very  often  with  happy  results,  but,  of  course,  with  results  even 
more  obvious  to  the  most  uncritical  eye  than  the  results  of  the 
imitation  of  Tennyson  itself. 

The  attempts  to  be  original  and  to  break  away  from  these  and 
other  imitations — the  principal  of  them  being  that  of  the  so-called 
Spasmodic  school,  which  flourished  at  the  dead  waist  and  middle 
of  the  century — were  not  particularly  happy,  and  those  who  in- 
cline to  gloomy  views  may  say  that  the  imitation  was  less  happy 
still.  In  Mr.  Matthew  Arnold,  a  recalcitrant  but  unmistakable 
Wordsworthian,  sharing  a  partly  reluctant  allegiance  between 
Wordsworth,  the  ancients,  Goethe,  and  Tennyson  himself,  it  is 
impossible  not  to  think  that  a  freer  attitude,  a  more  independent 
and  less  literary  aim,  might  have  strengthened  his  elegance, 
suppled  his  curious  mixture  of  stiffness  and  grace,  and  even  made 
him  less  unequal  than  he  actually  is.  And  yet  he  is  much  the 
greatest  poet  of  the  period.  Its  effect  was  more  disastrous  still 
upon  the  second  Lord  Lytton,  who  was  content  to  employ  an 
excellent  lyrical  vein,  and  a  gift  of  verse  satire  of  the  fantastic 
kind  so  distinct  and  fascinating,  that  it  approaches  the  merit  of 
fantasists  in  other  kinds  of  the  former  group,  like  Beddoes  and 
Darlcy,  to  far  too  great  an  extent  on  echoes.  The  fact  is,  that 
by  this  time,  to  speak  conceitedly,  the  obsession  of  the  book  was 
getting  oppressive.  Men  could  hardly  sing  for  remembering,  or, 
at  least,  without  remembering,  what  others  had  sung  before  them, 
and  became  either  slavishly  imitative  or  wilfully  recalcitrant  to 
imitation.  The  great  leaders  indeed  continued  to  sing  each  in 
his  own  way,  and,  though  with  perfect  knowledge  of  their  fore- 


45s  CONCLUSION 


runners,  not  in  the  least  hampered  by  that  knowledge.  But 
something  else  was  needed  to  freshen  the  middle  regions  of  song. 

It  was  found  in  that  remarkable  completion  of  the  English 
Romantic  movement,  which  is  in  relation  to  art  called  prae- 
Raphaelitism,  and  which  is  represented  in  literature,  to  mention 
only  the  greatest  names,  by  Rossetti,  his  sister,  Mr.  Morris,  and 
Mr.  Swinburne.  By  the  close  of  the  century  this  movement,  still 
active  in  art,  had,  without  being  exactly  or  necessarily  finished, 
come  to  what  we  may  call  a  period  in  literature,  and  could 
without  impropriety  be  discussed  as  a  whole  in  at  least  its  first 
stage  or  stages. 

The  first  thing  of  interest  in  general  history  which  strikes 
us,  in  regard  to  this  delightful  chapter  of  English  poetry,  is  its 
illustration — a  common  one  in  life  and  letters — of  the  fact  that 
there  is  a  false  as  well  as  a  true  side  to  the  question  quoted  by 
Aristotle  :  "  If  water  chokes  you,  what  are  you  to  drink  on  the 
top  of  it?"  "  Wine,"  one  kind  of  humourist  might  answer ;  "  More 
water,"  another :  and  both  rightly.  It  has  been  said  that  the 
group  which  preceded  this  suffered  from  the  pressure  of  too 
constant,  wide,  and  various  reminiscence,  literary,  artistic,  and 
other.  The  prae-Raphaelites  refreshed  themselves  and  the  world 
by  applying  still  more  strenuously  to  the  particular  kind  and 
period  of  such  reminiscence  which  had  been  hitherto,  despite  the 
mediaeval  excursions  of  many  from  Percy  to  Tennyson,  imperfectly 
utilised.  The  literary  practitioners  of  the  school  (with  whom 
alone  we  are  concerned)  were  not  indeed  by  any  means  purely 
mediaeval  in  their  choice  of  subject,  in  their  founts  of  inspiration, 
or  in  their  method  of  treatment.  English  poetry  has  known  few 
if  any  more  accomplished  scholars  both  in  the  classics  and  in  the 
modern  languages  than  Mr.  Swinburne,  for  instance  ;  and  some- 
thing similar  might  be  said  of  others.  But,  on  the  whole,  the 
return  of  this  school — for  all  new  things  in  literature  are  returns — 
was  to  a  medievalism  different  from  the  tentative  and  scrappy 
medievalism  of  Percy,  from  the  genial  but  slightly  superficial 
mediaevalism  of  Scott,  and  even  from  the  more  exact  but  narrow 


CONCLUSION  459 


and  distinctly  conventionalised  medisevalism  of  Tennyson.  They 
had  other  appeals,  but  this  was  their  chief. 

It  may  seem  that  mere  or  main  archaism  is  not  a  very 
charming  or  powerful  thing,  and  in  weaker  hands  it  would  not 
have  been  either  one  or  the  other ;  but  it  so  happened  that  these 
hands  were  very  strong  indeed.  Mr.  Rossetti  had  one  of  the 
most  astonishing  combinations  ever  known  of  artistically  separate 
gifts,  as  well  as  a  singular  blend  of  passion  and  humour.  His 
sister  was  one  of  the  great  religious  poets  of  the  world.  Mr. 
Swinburne  has  never  been  surpassed,  if  he  has  ever  been  equalled, 
by  any  poet  in  any  language  for  command  of  the  more  rushing 
and  flowing  forms  of  verse.  Mr.  Morris  has  few  equals  in  any 
time  or  country  for  narrative  at  once  decorative  and  musical. 
Moreover,  though  it  may  seem  whimsical  or  extravagant  to  say  so, 
these  poets  added  to  the  very  charm  of  mediaeval  literature  which 
they  thus  revived  a  subtle  something  which  differentiates  it  from 
— which  to  our  perhaps  blind  sight  seems  to  be  wanting  in — 
mediaeval  literature  itself.  It  is  constantly  complained  (and  some 
of  those  who  cannot  go  all  the  way  with  the  complainants  can  see 
what  they  mean)  that  the  graceful  and  labyrinthine  stones,  the 
sweet  snatches  of  song,  the  quaint  drama  and  legend  of  the 
Middle  Ages  lack — to  us— life ;  that  they  are  shadowy,  unreal, 
tapestry  on  the  wall,  not  alive  even  as  living  pageants  are.  By 
the  strong  touch  of  modernness  which  these  poets  and  the  best  of 
their  followers  introduced  into  their  work,  they  have  given  the 
vivification  required. 

Beyond  them  we  must  not  go,  nor  inquire  whether  the  poets 
who  have  not  come  to  forty  year  represent  a  new  school  of  the 
masterful  and  supreme  kind,  or  one  of  the  experimental  and 
striving  sort,  or  something  a  good  deal  worse  than  this,  a  period 
of  sheer  interval  and  suspense,  unenlivened  even  by  considerable 
attempt.  Not  only  our  scheme,  not  only  common  prudence  and 
politeness,  but  most  of  all  the  conditions  of  critical  necessity  insist 
on  the  curtain  being  here  dropped.  It  is  possible  that  a  critic 
may  be  able  to  isolate  and  project  himself  sufficiently  to  judge,  as 


460  CONCLUSION 


posterity  will  judge  them,  the  actually  accomplished  work  of  his 
own  contemporaries  and  juniors.  But  even  such  a  skilful  and 
fortunate  person  cannot  judge  the  work  which  they  have  not  yet 
produced,  and  which  may  in  all  cases,  and  must  in  some,  modify 
their  position  and  alter  their  rank. 

But  what  has  been  has  been,  and  on  this  mass  (not  in  the 
actual  case  "vulgar"  by  any  means)  of  things  done  it  is  possible 
to  pronounce  securely.  And  with  security  it  may  be  said  that 
for  total  amount,  total  merit,  total  claims  of  freshness  and 
distinctness,  no  period  of  poetical  literature  can  much,  if  at  all, 
exceed  the  ninety  years  of  English  verse  from  The  Ancient 
Mariner  to  Crossing  the  Bar.  The  world  has  had  few  poets 
better  than  the  best  of  ours  during  this  time  in  degree ;  it  has 
had  none  like  Shelley,  perhaps  none  exactly  like  Wordsworth,  in 
kind.  The  secret  of  long  narrative  poems  that  should  interest 
has  been  recovered ;  the  sonnet,  one  of  the  smallest  but  one  of 
the  most  perfect  of  poetic  forms,  has  been  recovered  likewise. 
Attempts  to  recover  the  poetic  drama  have  been  mostly  failures ; 
and  serious  satire  has  hardly  reappeared.  But  lighter  satire, 
with  other  "applied"  poetry,  has  shown  variety  and  excel- 
lence. Above  all  lyric,  the  most  poetic  kind  of  poetry,  has 
attained  a  perfection  never  known  before,  except  once  in  Eng- 
land and  once  in  Greece.  It  has  been  impossible  hitherto  to 
make  a  full  and  free  anthology  of  the  lyric  poets  from  Burns 
and  Blake  to  Tennyson  and  Browning  to  match  the  anthologies 
often  made  of  those  from  Surrey  or  Sidney  to  Herrick  or 
Vaughan.  But  when  it  can  be  done  it  is  a  question  whether 
the  later  volume  will  not  even  excel  the  earlier  in  intensity  and 
variety,  if  not  perhaps  in  freshness  of  charm. 

And  then  it  is  needful  once  more  to  insist,  even  at  the  risk  of 
disgusting,  on  the  additional  interest  given  by  the  subtle  and 
delicate,  but  still  distinctly  traceable  gradations,  the  swell  and 
sinking,  the  flow  and  ebb,  of  poetical  production  and  character 
during  the  time.  As  no  other  flourishing  time  of  any  poetry 
has  lasted  so  long,  so  none  has  had  the  chance  of  developing 


xii  CONCLUSION  461 

these  mutations  in  so  extensive  and  attractive  a  manner;  in  none 
has  it  been  possible  to  feel  the  pulse  of  poetry,  so  to  speak,  in  so 
connected  and  considerable  a  succession  of  experiment.  Poetical 
criticism  can  never  be  scientific ;  but  it  can  seldom  have  had  an 
opportunity  of  going  nearer  to  a  scientific  process  than  here, 
owing  to  the  volume,  the  connection,  the  duration,  the  accessi- 
bility of  the  phenomena  submitted  to  the  critic.  The  actual 
secret  as  usual  escapes ;  but  we  can  hunt  the  fugitive  by  a  closer 
trail  than  usual  through  the  chambers  of  her  flight. 

Of  the  highest  poetry,  however,  as  of  other  highest  things, 
Goethe's  famous  axiom  Uber  alien  Gipfeln  ist  J?uk  holds  good. 
Although  there  is  a  difference  between  the  expressions  of  this 
highest  poetry  in  the  fifth  and  fourth  centuries  before  Christ,  in  the 
fourteenth,  seventeenth,  and  nineteenth  after  Christ  there  is  also  a 
certain  quiet  sameness,  not  indiscernibility  but  still  identity.  The 
lower  kinds  of  literature  admit  of  more  apparent  and  striking 
freshness  of  exterior.  And  perhaps  the  most  strikingly  fresh, 
some  might  even  say  the  distinctive,  product  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  is  its  prose  fiction. 

This,  as  has  been  shown  in  detail,  is  much  later  in  date  than 
the  poetry  in  anything  like  a  characteristic  and  fully  developed 
state.  Although  it  was  busily  produced  during  the  last  twenty 
years  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the  first  fifteen  of  the 
nineteenth,  the  very  best  work  of  the  time,  except  such  purely 
isolated  things  as  Vathek,  are  experiments,  and  all  but  the  very 
best — the  novels  of  Miss  Edgeworth,  those  written  but  not  till 
quite  the  end  of  the  time  published  by  Miss  Austen,  and  a  very 
few  others — are  experiments  of  singular  lameness  and  ill  success. 

With  Scott's  change  from  verse  to  prose,  the  modern  romance 
admittedly,  and  to  a  greater  extent  than  is  generally  thought  the 
modern  novel,  came  into  being  ;  and  neither  has  gone  out  of 

'  O    "  O 

being  since.  In  the  two  chapters  which  have  been  devoted  to  the 
subject  we  have  seen  how  the  overpowering  success  of  Warerley 
bred  a  whole  generation  of  historical  novels ;  how  side  by  side 
with  this  the  older  novel  of  manners,  slightly  altered,  continued 


462  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

to  be  issued,  with  comic  deviations  chiefly,  as  in  the  hands  of 
Theodore  Hook ;  how  Bulwer  attempted  a  sort  of  cross  between 
the  two  ;  how  about  the  middle  of  the  century  the  historical  novel 
either  ceased  or  changed,  to  revive  later  after  a  middle  period 
illustrated  by  the  brilliant  romances  of  Kingsley ;  how  about  the 
same  time  the  strictly  modern  novel  of  manners  came  into  being 
in  the  hands  of  Thackeray,  Miss  Bronte,  George  Eliot,  and 
Anthony  Trollope,  Dickens  overlapping  both  periods  in  a  fantastic 
and  nondescript  style  of  his  own  ;  and  how  more  recently  still 
both  romance  and  novel  have  spread  out  and  ramified  into 
endless  subdivisions. 

There  is,  however,  this  broad  line  of  demarcation  between 
poetry  and  the  novel,  that  they  are  written  for  different  ends  and 
from  different  motives.  It  is  natural  to  man  to  write  poetry ;  it 
does  not  appear  to  be  by  any  means  so  certainly  or  unvaryingly 
necessary  to  him  to  read  it.  Except  at  rare  periods  and  for  short 
times,  poetry  has  never  offered  the  slightest  chance  of  livelihood 
to  any  considerable  number  of  persons ;  and  it  is  tolerably 
certain  that  if  the  aggregate  number  of  poets  since  the  foundation 
of  the  world  had  had  nothing  to  live  on  but  their  aggregate  gains 
as  poets,  starvation  would  have  been  the  commonplace  rule, 
instead  of  the  dramatic  exception,  among  the  sons  of  Apollo. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  no  doubt  also  natural  to  man  to  tell 
prose  stories,  and  it  seems,  though  it  was  a  late- discovered 
aptitude,  that  it  is  not  unnatural  to  him  to  read  them  ;  but  the 
writing  of  them  does  not  seem  to  be  at  all  an  innate  or  widely 
disseminated  need.  Until  some  hundred  or  two  hundred  years 
ago  very  few  were  written  at  all  ;  the  instances  of  persons  who  do 
but  write  novels  because  they  must  are  exceedingly  rare,  and  it  is 
as  certain  as  anything  can  be  that  of  the  enormous  production  of 
the  last  three-quarters  of  a  century  not  5,  perhaps  not  i  per 
cent  would  have  been  produced  if  the  producing  had  not  led, 
during  the  whole  of  that  time,  in  most  cases  but  those  of  hopeless 
incompetence,  to  some  sort  of  a  livelihood,  in  many  to  very 
comfortable  income,  and  in  some  to  positive  wealth  and  fame. 


xii  CONCLUSION  463 

In  other  words,  poetry  is  the  creation  of  supply  and  novel-writing 
of  demand ;  poetry  can  hardly  ever  be  a  trade  and  in  very  rare 
cases  a  profession,  while  novel -writing  is  commonly  a  very 
respectable  profession,  and  unfortunately  sometimes  a  rather 
disreputable  trade. 

Like  other  professions,  however,  it  enlists  genius  sometimes, 
talent  often ;  and  the  several  and  successive  ways  in  which  this 
genius  and  this  talent  show  themselves  are  of  more  than  sufficient 
interest.  But  the  steady  demand,  and  the  inevitable  answer  to  it, 
work  adversely  to  such  spontaneous  and  interesting  fluctuations 
of  production  as  those  which  we  have  traced  in  reference  to 
poetry.  There  have  been  times,  particularly  that  between  the 
cessation  of  Sir  Walter's  best  work  and  the  perfecting  of  that  of 
Thackeray,  in  which  the  average  value  of  even  the  best  novels 
was  much  lower  than  at  other  times.  But  even  in  these  the 
average  volume  maintained  itself  very  well,  and,  indeed,  steadily 
increased. 

It  is  this  which,  with  another  to  be  mentioned  shortly, 
will,  so  far  as  it  is  possible  for  a  contemporary  to  judge,  be  noted 
in  the  literary  history  of  the  future  as  the  distinguishing  crop  or 
field  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Sermons,  essays,  plays,  no 
doubt,  continue  to  be  written ;  but  the  novel  has  supplanted  the 
sermon,  the  essay,  the  play  in  the  place  which  each  at  different 
times  held  as  the  popular  form  of  literature.  It  may  be  added, 
or  repeated,  that  it  has  in  part  at  least  achieved  this  result  by 
trespassing  upon  the  provinces  of  all  these  three  forms  and  of 
many  others.  This  is  true,  but  is  of  somewhat  less  importance 
than  might  be  thought.  The  fable  has  an  old  trick  of  adjusting 
itself  to  almost  every  possible  kind  of  literary  use,  and  the  novel 
is  only  an  enlarged  and  more  fully-organised  fable.  It  does  not, 
no  doubt,  do  best  when  it  abuses  this  privilege  of  its  ancestor,  and 
saturates  itself  overmuch  with  "  purpose,"  but  it  has  at  least  an 
ancestral  right  to  do  so. 

There  is  no  doubt  also  that  the  popularity  of  the  novel  has  been 
very  directly  connected  with  a  cause  which  has  had  all  manner  of 


464  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

effects  fathered  upon  it — often  with  no  just  causation  or  filiation 
whatever — to  wit,  the  spread  of  education.  In  the  proper  sense,  of 
course,  the  spread  of  education  must  always  be  strictly  limited. 
The  number  of  educable  persons  probably  bears  a  pretty  con- 
stant ratio  to  the  population,  and  when  the  education  reaches 
the  level  of  the  individual's  containing  power,  it  simply  runs 
over  and  is  lost.  But  it  is  possible  to  teach  nearly  everybody 
reading  and  writing ;  and  it  is  a  curious  but  exact  observation  that 
a  very  large  proportion  of  those  who  have  been  taught  reading 
require  something  to  read.  Now  the  older  departments  of 
literature  do  not  lend  themselves  with  any  facility  to  constant 
reading  by  the  average  man  or  woman,  whose  requirements  may 
be  said  to  be  amusement  rather  than  positive  delight,  occupation 
much  rather  than  intellectual  exertion,  and  above  all,  something  to 
pass  time.  For  these  requirements,  or  this  compound  requirement, 
the  hearing  of  some  new  thing  has  been  of  old  recognised  as  the 
surest  and  most  generally  useful  specific.  And  the  novel  holds 
itself  out,  not  indeed  always  quite  truly,  as  being  new  or  nothing 
by  name  and  nature.  Accordingly  the  demand  for  novels  has 
gone  on  ever  increasing,  and  the  supply  has  never  failed  to  keep 
up  with  it. 

Nor  would  it  be  just  to  say  that  the  quality  has  sunk  appreci- 
ably. The  absolutely  palmy  day  of  the  English  nineteenth 
century  in  novel-writing  was  no  doubt  some  thirty-five  or  forty 
years  ago.  Not  even  the  contemporary  France  of  that  date  can 
show  such  a  "galaxy-gallery"  as  the  British  novelists — Dickens, 
Thackeray,  Miss  Bronte,  George  Eliot,  Trollope,  Kingsley,  Bulwer, 
Disraeli,  Lever,  Mr.  Meredith,  and  others — who  all  wrote  in  the 
fifties.  But  at  the  beginning  of  the  period  the  towering  genius  of 
Scott  and  the  perfect  art  of  Miss  Austen,  if  we  add  to  them 
Miss  Edgeworth's  genial  talent,  did  not  find  very  much  of  even 
good  second-rate  matter  to  back  them  ;  there  was,  as  has  been 
said,  a  positively  barren  time  succeeding  this  first  stage  and 
preceding  the  "  fifty  "  period  ;  and  in  the  years  immediately  after 
1870,  when  Thackeray  and  Dickens  were  dead,  Trollope  and  George 


xii  CONCLUSION  465 

Eliot  past  their  best,  Kingsley  and  Bulwer  moribund,  Mr.  Mere- 
dith writing  sparely  and  unnoticed,  the  new  romantic  school  not 
arisen,  and  no  recruit  of  distinction  except  Mr.  Blackmore  firmly 
set,  things  were  apparently  a  great  deal  worse  with  us  in  point  of 
novel-writing  than  they  are  at  present.  Whether,  with  a  return  of 
promise  and  an  increase  of  performance,  with  a  variation  of  styles 
and  an  abundance  of  experiment,  there  has  also  been  a  relapse 
into  the  extravagances  which  we  have  had  in  this  very  book  to 
chronicle  as  characterising  the  fiction  of  a  hundred  years  earlier, — 
whether  we  have  had  over-luxuriant  and  non-natural  style,  attempts 
to  attract  by  loose  morality,  novels  of  purpose,  novels  of  problem, 
and  so  forth, — and  whether  the  coming  age  will  dismiss  much  of 
our  most  modern  work  as  not  superior  in  literary  and  inferior  in 
other  appeal  to  the  work  of  Godwin  and  Lewis,  Holcroft  and  Bage, 
it  is  not  necessary  distinctly  to  say.  But  our  best  is  certainly 
better  than  the  best  of  that  time,  our  worst  is  perhaps  not  worse ; 
and  the  novel  occupies  a  far  higher  place  in  general  estimation 
than  it  did  then.  Indeed  it  has  been  observed  by  the  sarcastic 
that  to  some  readers  of  novels,  and  even  to  some  writers  of  them, 
"novel"  and  "book"  seem  to  be  synonymous  terms,  and  that 
when  such  persons  speak  of  "  literature,"  they  mean  and  pretty 
distinctly  indicate  that  they  mean  novel-writing,  and  novel-writing 
only.  This  at  least  shows  that  the  seed  which  Scott  sowed,  or  the 
plant  which  he  grafted,  has  not  lost  its  vitality. 

Certainly  not  less,  perhaps  even  more,  distinctive  of  the  time 
in  history  must  be  that  development  and  transformation  of  what 
is  broadly  called  the  newspaper,  of  which  the  facts  and  details 
have  occupied  two  more  of  these  chapters.  It  is  true  that  at  times 
considerably  earlier  than  even  the  earliest  that  here  concerns  us, 
periodical  writing  had  been  something  of  a  power  in  England  as 
regards  politics,  had  enlisted  eminent  hands,  and  had  even  served 
once  or  twice  as  the  means  of  introduction  of  considerable  works 
in  belles  lettres.  But  the  Addisonian  Essay  had  been  something 
of  an  accident ;  Swift's  participation  in  \ho.  Examiner  vi'x-,  another  ; 
Defoe's  abundant  journalism  brought  him  more  discredit  than  profit 

2   H 


466  CONCLUSION  CHAP 

or  praise ;  and  though  Pulteney  and  the  Opposition  worked  the 
press  against  Walpole,  the  process  brought  little  benefit  to  the 
persons  concerned.  Reviewing  was  meagrely  done  and  wretchedly 
paid ;  the  examples  of  Robinson  Crusoe  earlier  and  Sir  Launcdot 
Greaves  later  are  exceptions  which  prove  the  rule  that  the 
feuilleton  was  not  in  demand ;  in  fact  before  our  present  period 
newspaper-writing  was  rather  dangerous,  was  more  than  rather 
disreputable,  and  offered  exceedingly  little  encouragement  to  any 
one  to  make  it  the  occasion  of  work  in  pure  literature,  or  even  to 
employ  it  as  a  means  of  livelihood,  while  .attempting  other  and 
higher,  though  less  paying  kinds. 

The  period  of  the  French  Revolution,  if  not  the  French 
Revolution  itself,  changed  all  this,  assisted  no  doubt  by  the  natural 
and  inevitable  effects  of  the  spread  of  reading  and  the  multiplica- 
tion of  books.  People  wanted  to  see  the  news ;  papers  sprang 
up  in  competition  to  enable  them  to  see  the  news ;  and  the 
competitors  strove  to  make  themselves  more  agreeable  than  their 
rivals  by  adding  new  attractions.  Again,  the  activity  of  the 
Jacobin  party,  which  early  and  of  course  directed  itself  to  the  press, 
necessitated  activity  on  the  other  side.  The  keenest  intellects, 
the  best-trained  wits  of  the  nation,  sometimes  under  some  disguise, 
sometimes  openly,  took  to  journalism,  and  it  became  simply 
absurd  to  regard  the  journalist  as  a  disreputable  garreteer  when 
Windham  and  Canning  were  journalists.  The  larger  sale  of  books 
and  the  formation  of  a  regular  system  of  "pushing"  them  also 
developed  reviews — too  frequently,  no  doubt,  in  the  direction  of 
mere  puffing,  but  even  thus  with  the  beneficent  result  that  other 
reviews  came  into  existence  which  were  not  mere  puff-engines. 

Even  these  causes  and  others  will  not  entirely  explain  the 
extraordinary  development  of  periodicals  of  all  kinds  from 
quarterly  to  daily,  of  which  the  Edinburgh,  Bla:ku<ood,  the 
Examiner,  and  the  Times  were  respectively  the  most  remarkable 
examples  and  pioneers  in  the  earlier  years  of  the  century,  though 
as  a  literary  organ  the  Morning  Post  had  at  first  rather  the 
advantage  of  the  Times.  Hut,  as  has  been  said  here  constantly, 


xii  CONCLUSION  467 

you  can  never  explain  everything  in  literary  history ;  and  it  would 
be  extremely  dull  if  you  could.  The  newspaper  press  had,  for 
good  or  for  ill,  to  come ;  external  events  to  some  obvious  extent 
helped  its  coming;  individual  talents  and  aptitudes  helped  it 
likewise ;  but  the  main  determining  force  was  the  force  of  hidden 
destiny. 

There  is,  however,  no  mistake  possible  about  the  results.  It 
is  but  a  slight  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  periodical  rapidly 
swallowed  up  all  other  forms  of  literature,  to  this  extent  and  in 
this  sense,  that  there  is  hardly  a  single  one  of  these  forms 
capital  performance  in  which  has  not  at  one  time  or  another 
formed  part  of  the  stuff  of  periodicals,  and  has  not  by  them  been 
first  introduced  to  the  world.  Not  a  little  of  our  poetry;  probably 
the  major  part  of  our  best  fiction  ;  all  but  a  very  small  part  of  our 
essay-writing,  critical,  meditative,  and  miscellaneous;  and  a  portion, 
much  larger  than  would  at  one  time  have  seemed  conceivable,  of 
serious  writing  in  history,  philosophy,  theology,  science,  and 
scholarship,  have  passed  through  the  mint  or  mill  of  the  news- 
paper press  before  presenting  themselves  in  book  form.  A  certain 
appreciable,  though  small  part  of  the  best,  with  much  of  the  worst, 
has  never  got  beyond  that  form. 

To  attempt  to  collect  the  result  of  this  change  is  to  attempt  some- 
thing not  at  all  easy,  something  perhaps  which  may  be  regarded 
as  not  particularly  valuable.  The  distinction  between  literature 
and  journalism  which  is  so  often  heard  is,  like  most  such  things, 
a  fallacy,  or  at  least  capable  of  being  made  fallacious.  Put  as  it 
usually  is  when  the  intention  is  disobliging  to  the  journalist,  it 
comes  to  this  : — that  the  Essays  of  JEtia,  that  Southey's  Lift'1  oj 
Nelson,  that  some  of  the  best  work  of  Carlyle,  Tennyson, 
Thackeray,  and  others  the  list  of  whom  might  be  prolonged  at 
pleasure,  is  not  literature.  Put  as  it  sometimes  is  by  extremely 
foolish  people,  it  would  go  to  the  extent  that  anything  which  has 
not  been  published  in  a  daily,  weekly,  monthly,  or  quarterly 
publication  is  literature. 

There  is  probably  no  subject  on  which  \\  is  more  necessary  tc 


468  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 


clear  the  mind  of  cant  than  this.  Of  course  there  is  journalism 
in  the  sense  opposed  to  literature,  though  not  necessarily  opposed 
in  any  bad  sense.  No  wise  man  intends,  and  no  wise  man  will 
ever  suffer,  articles  which  are  in  the  strict  sense  articles,  which  are 
intended  to  comment  on  merely  passing  events,  and  to  produce  a 
merely  immediate  effect,  to  be  extracted  from  journals  and  put  on 
record  as  books.  Not  only  is  the  treatment  unsuitable  for  such 
record,  but  it  may  almost  be  said  that  the  treatment  suitable  for 
things  so  to  be  recorded  is  actually  unsuitable  for  things  ephemeral. 
But  there  is  a  very  large  amount  of  writing  to  which  this  does  not 
in  the  least  apply,  and  in  which  it  can  make  no  kind  of  real 
difference  whether  the  result  appears  by  itself  in  a  bound  cloth 
volume  as  a  whole,  or  in  parts  with  other  things  in  a  pamphlet, 
covered  with  paper,  or  not  covered  at  all.  The  grain  of  truth 
which  the  fallacy  carries  is  really  this : — that  the  habit  of  treating 
some  subjects  in  the  peculiar  fashion  most  effective  in  journalism 
may  spread  disastrously  to  the  treatment  of  other  subjects  which 
ought  to  be  treated  as  literature.  This  is  a  truth,  but  not  a  large 
one.  There  have  been  at  all  times,  at  least  since  the  invention 
of  printing  and  probably  before  it,  persons  who,  though  they  may 
be  guiltless  of  having  ever  written  an  article  in  their  lives,  have 
turned  out  more  or  less  ponderous  library  volumes  in  which  the 
very  worst  sins  of  the  worst  kind  of  journalist  are  rampant. 

There  are,  however,  more  thoughtful  reasons  for  regarding  the 
development  of  periodicals  as  not  an  unmixed  boon  to  letters. 
The  more  evanescent  kinds  of  writing  are,  putting  fiction  out  of 
the  question,  so  much  the  more  profitable  in  journalism  that  it 
certainly  may  tempt — that  it  certainly  has  tempted — men  who 
could  produce,  and  would  otherwise  have  produced,  solid  literature. 
And  there  is  so  much  more  room  in  it  for  light  things  than 
for  things  which  the  average  reader  regards  as  heavy,  that  the 
heavy  contributor  is  apt  to  be  at  a  discount,  and  the  light  at  a 
premium.  But  all  this  is  exceedingly  obvious.  And  it  may  be  met 
on  the  other  side  by  the  equally  obvious  consideration  already 
referred  to,  that  periodicals  have  made  the  literary  life  possible 


CONCLUSION  469 


in  a  vast  number  of  cases  where  it  was  not  possible  before ;  that 
whereas  "  toil,  envy,  want,  the  patron,  and  the  gaol "  was  not  a 
very  exaggerated  description  of  its  prospects  little  more  than  a 
hundred  years  ago,  the  patron  has  become  superfluous,  want 
and  the  gaol  rather  unlikely,  except  in  cases  of  extreme  mis- 
conduct, incompetence,  or  ill-luck,  while  if  toil  and  envy  re- 
main unvanquished,  they  are  not  specially  fated  to  the  literary 
lot.  Indeed  the  more  paradoxical  of  Devil's  Advocates  against 
the  press  usually  urge  that  it  has  made  the  literary  life  too  easy, 
has  tempted  too  many  into  it,  and  has  thereby  increased  the  flood 
of  mediocrity. 

The  most  serious  objection  of  all  perhaps,  though  even  this 
is  rather  idle  in  face  of  accomplished  facts,  is  that  the  perpetual 
mincing  up  and  boiling  down  of  the  constituents  of  the  diet  of 
reading  have  produced,  in  the  appetite  and  digestive  faculties  of 
the  modern  reader,  an  inability  to  cope  with  a  really  solid  meal 
of  perhaps  slightly  tough  matter,  and  that  periodicals  not  merely 
eschew  the  provision  of  this  solid  stuff  themselves,  but  do  their 
best  to  make  things  worse  by  manipulating  the  contents  of  books 
that  do  contain  it. 

The  fact,  however,  once  more,  concerns  us  much  more  than 
moralisings  about  the  fact ;  and  the  fact  of  the  prominence,  the 
extraordinary  prominence,  of  the  periodical  press  in  the  nine- 
teenth century,  is  as  little  open  to  dispute  as  the  prominence  in 
that  century's  later  mechanical  history  of  discoveries  in  electricity, 
or  in  its  earlier  of  experiments  with  steam.  Occasionally  one 
may  hear  enthusiasts  of  one  kind  or  another  announcing  with  joy 
or  horror  that  the  periodical  is  killing  the  book.  But  if  it  is,  it  is 
very  impartially  engaged  in  begetting  it  at  the  same  time  that  it 
kills ;  and  it  may  be  very  seriously  doubted  whether  this  killing  of 
a  book  is  an  easy  act  of  murder  to  commit.  With  the  printing 
press  to  produce,  the  curiosity  of  man  to  demand,  and  his  vanity 
and  greed — if  not  also  his  genius  and  ambition — to  supply,  the 
book  is  in  all  probability  pretty  safe.  In  the  forms  and  varieties 
of  this  periodical  publication  we  have  seen  some  interesting  changes. 


470  CONCLUSION 


As  might  have  been  expected,  the  tendency  has  been  for  the  inter- 
vals of  publication  to  be  shortened — for  the  quarterly  to  give  way 
as  the  fashionable  form  to  the  monthly,  the  monthly  to  the 
weekly,  the  weekly  to  the  daily.  Many  years  ago  Macaulay,  in  a 
mild  protest  against  having  his  articles  altered  by  Macvey  Napier, 
suggested  in  effect  that  the  bloom  might  be  left  on  poor  things 
destined  to  be  read  only  for  a  month  or  so.  The  duration  of 
an  article  now  may  be  measured  rather  by  hours  than  by  weeks. 
Still  many  of  these  changes  are  more  apparent  than  real ;  and  just 
as  the  institution  of  the  graver  monthly  reviews  twenty  years  ago 
simply  reintroduced  the  quarterly  article  in  a  scarcely  altered  form 
after  it  had  been  pushed  out  of  favour  by  the  slighter  magazine, 
so  other  introductions  have  been  in  fact  reintroductions. 

One  point,  however,  of  real  importance  in  literary  history 
remains  to  be  noticed,  and  that  is  the  conflict  between  signed 
and  anonymous  writing.  Partly  from  the  causes  above  enume- 
rated as  having  conduced  to  the  keeping  of  journalism  in  a 
condition  of  discredit  and  danger,  partly  owing  to  national 
idiosyncrasies,  the  habit  of  anonymous  writing  was  almost 
universal  in  the  English  press  at  the  beginning  of  the  century. 
It  may  have  been  perfectly  well  known  that  such  and  such  an 
article  in  the  Quarterly  was  by  Southey  or  Croker,  such  another 
in  the  Edinburgh  by  Sydney  Smith  or  Macaulay,  but  the  know- 
ledge was,  so  to  speak,  unofficial.  The  question  of  the  identity 
of  "  Zeta "  in  Blackivood  cost  a  man's  life ;  and  the  system 
resulted  (in  daily  papers  especially)  in  so  much  editorial  inter- 
mixture and  refashioning,  that  sometimes  it  would  really  have 
been  impossible  to  assign  a  single  and  authentic  paternity.  Even 
about  the  editorship  of  the  great  periodicals  a  sort  of  coquetry  of 
veiling  was  preserved,  and  editors'  names,  though  in  most  cases 
perfectly  well  known,  seldom  or  never  appeared. 

It  is  difficult  to  say  exactly  when  or  how  this  system  began  to 
be  infringed.  But  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  prominence  given 
in  Household  Words  to  the  name  and  personality  of  Dickens, 
who  was  not  unfriendly  to  self-advertisement,  had  a  good  deal  to 


xil  CONCLUSION  47» 


do  with  it ;  and  when,  a  little  later,  the  cheap  shilling  magazines 
appeared,  writing  with  names  became  the  rule,  without  them 
the  exception.  Criticism,  however,  for  obvious  reasons  still  held 
back ;  and  it  was  not  till  pretty  late  in  the  sixties  that  the 
example,  taken  more  or  less  directly  from  the  French,  of  signed 
reviews  was  set  by  the  Academy  among  weekly  papers,  and  the 
Fortnightly  among  monthly  reviews.  It  has  been  very  largely 
followed  even  in  daily  newspapers,  and  the  Saturday  Review  was 
probably  the  last  newspaper  of  mark  that  maintained  an  absolutely 
rigid  system  of  anonymity.  It  should,  however,  be  observed  that 
the  change,  while  not  even  yet  complete — leading  articles  being 
still  very  rarely  signed — has  by  no  means  united  all  suffrages,  and 
has  even  lost  some  that  it  had.  Mr.  John  Morley,  for  instance, 
who  had  espoused  it  warmly  as  editor  of  the  Fortnightly,  and  had, 
perhaps,  done  more  than  any  other  man  to  spread  it,  has  avowed 
in  a  very  interesting  paper  grave  doubts  about  the  result.  Still  it 
undoubtedly  has  increased,  and  is  increasing,  and  in  such  cases  it 
is  much  easier  to  express  an  opinion  that  things  ought  to  be  dimin- 
ished, than  either  to  expect  that  they  will,  or  to  devise  any  means 
whereby  the  diminution  is  to  be  effected.  As  for  what  is  desir- 
able as  distinguished  from  what  is  likely,  the  weight  of  opinion 
may  be  thought  to  be  in  favour  of  the  absence  of  signature. 
Anonymous  criticism,  if  abused,  may  no  doubt  be  abused  to  a 
graver  extent  than  is  possible  with  signed  criticism.  But  such  a 
hackneyed  maxim  as  corruptio  optimi  shows  that  this  is  of  itself 
no  argument.  On  the  other  hand,  signed  criticism  diminishes 
both  the  responsibility  and  the  authority  of  the  editor ;  it  adds 
either  an  unhealthy  gag  or  an  unhealthy  stimulus  to  the  tongue 
and  pen  of  the  contributor ;  it  lessens  the  general  weight  of  the 
verdict ;  and  it  provokes  the  worst  fault  of  criticism,  the  aim  at 
showing  off  the  critic's  cleverness  rather  than  at  exhibiting  the 
real  value  and  character  of  the  thing  criticised.  And  perhaps 
some  may  think  the  most  serious  objection  of  all  to  be  that  it 
encourages  the  employment  of  critics,  and  the  reception  of  what 
they  say,  rather  for  their  names  than  for  their  competence. 


472  CONCLUSION 


In  that  very  important  department  of  literature  which  stands 
midway  between  Belles  Lettres  and  Science,  the  department  of 
History,  the  century  cannot  indeed  claim  such  striking  and  popu- 
larly effective  innovations  as  in  the  departments  of  prose  fiction 
and  of  periodical  writing.  Yet  it  may  be  questioned  whether  the 
change  of  this  old  kind  is  not  in  itself  almost  as  noteworthy  as  in 
the  other  cases  is  the  practical  introduction  of  a  new.  What  the 
change  is  was  epigrammatically,  if  somewhat  paradoxically,  summed 
up  recently  by  a  great  authority,  Lord  Acton.  "  History,"  the 
Cambridge  Professor  of  that  art  or  science  said  in  his  inaugural 
lecture,  "has  become  independent  of  the  historian." 

It  is  possible  to  demur  to  the  fact,  but  it  is  not  difficult  to  ex- 
plain the  meaning.  From  the  necessity  of  the  case,  the  earliest 
history,  at  least  in  the  West,  is  almost  independent  of  documents  and 
records.  Thucydides  and  Herodotus  wrote,  the  one  from  what  he 
had  actually  seen  and  heard  of  contemporary  events,  the  other 
partly  from  the  same  sources  and  partly  from  tradition  of  short  date. 
Somewhat  later  historians  of  course  had  their  predecessors  before 
them,  and  in  a  few  cases  a  certain  amount  of  document,  but  never 
a  large  amount.  When  history,  vernacular  or  Latin,  began  to  be 
written  again  in  the  dark  and  middle  ages,  the  absence  of  docu- 
ments was  complicated  (except  in  the  case  of  those  early  chroniclers, 
English  and  Irish  chiefly,  who  merely  put  down  local  events)  by 
that  more  peculiar  and  unaccountable,  though  possibly  kindred, 
absence  of  critical  spirit,  which,  of  the  many  things  more  or  less 
fancifully  attributed  to  the  mediaeval  mind,  is  perhaps  the  most 
certain.  It  is  a  constant  puzzle  to  modern  readers  how  to  account 
exactly  for  the  fashion  in  which  men,  evidently  of  great  intel- 
lectual ability,  managed  to  be  without  any  sense  of  the  value  of 
evidence,  or  any  faculty  of  distinguishing  palpable  and  undoubted 
fiction  from  what  either  was,  or  reasonably  might  be  held  to  be, 
history.  But  by  degrees  this  sense  came  into  being  side  by  side 
with  the  multiplication  of  the  document  itself.  Even  then,  however, 
it  was  very  long  before  the  average  historian  either  could  or  would 
regard  himself  as  bound  first  to  consult  all  the  documents  available. 


xii  CONCLUSION  473 

and  then  to  sift  and  adjust  them  in  accordance  rather  with  the  laws 
of  evidence  and  the  teachings  of  the  philosophy  of  history  than 
with  his  own  predilections,  or  with  the  necessities  of  an  agree- 
able narrative.  But  the  patient  industry  of  the  French  school  of 
historical  scholars,  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  and  the  begin- 
ning of  the  eighteenth  century,  founded  this  new  tradition  ;  the 
magnificent  genius  of  Gibbon  showed  how  the  observance  of  it 
might  not  be  incompatible  with  history-writing  of  the  most  literary 
kind;  the  national  and  natural  tendency  of  German  study  adopted 
it ;  and  shortly  after  Gibbon's  own  day  the  school  of  historians, 
which  is  nothing  if  not  documentary,  began  gradually  to  oust  that 
of  which  the  picturesque,  if  not  strictly  historical,  legend  about 
the  Abbe  Vertot  and  his  "  Mon  siege  est  fait  "  is  the  anecdotic 
locus  dassicus  of  characterisation. 

It  has  been  shown,  in  the  chapter  devoted  to  the  subject,  how 
this  school  of  documentary  historians  grew  and  flourished  in 
England  itself,  from  the  days  of  Turner  and  Palgrave  to  those  of 
Froude  and  Freeman.  Certainly  there  could  not,  at  least  for  some 
time,  be  said  to  be  any  very  sensible  tendency  in  history  to  dis- 
pense with  the  historian,  or,  in  other  and  perhaps  rather  more  in- 
telligible words,  of  history  ceasing  to  be  literary.  No  historians 
have  been  more  omnilegent,  more  careful  of  the  document,  than 
Carlyle  and  Macaulay,  much  as  they  differed  in  other  respects, 
and  in  no  histories  has  the  "historian  "• — that  is  to  say,  the  personal 
writer  as  opposed  to  the  mere  "diplomatist" — been  more  evident 
than  he  is  in  theirs.  Nor  is  it  very  easy  to  see  why  the  mere 
study  of  the  document,  still  less  why  the  mere  accumulation  of  the 
document,  should  ever  render  superfluous  the  intelligent  shaping 
which  the  historian  alone  can  give.  In  the  first  place,  documents 
are  contradictory  and  want  sifting  and  harmonising ;  in  the  second 
they  want  grasping  and  interpreting;  in  the  third  (and  most  im- 
portant of  all)  they  need  to  be  made  alive. 

Nevertheless  Lord  Acton's  somewhat  enigmatic  utterance 
points,  however  vaguely,  to  real  dangers,  and  it  would  be  idle  to 
say  that  these  dangers  have  not  been  exemplified  in  the  period 


474  CONCLUSION 


and  department  we  are  considering.  In  the  first  place,  the  ever- 
increasing  burden  of  the  documents  to  be  consulted  is  more  and 
more  crushing,  and  more  and  more  likely  to  induce  any  one  but 
a  mere  drudge  either  to  relinquish  the  task  in  despair,  or  to  per- 
form it  with  a  constant  fear  before  his  eyes,  which  prevents  freedom 
and  breadth  of  work.  In  the  second  it  leads,  on  the  one  hand,  to 
enormous  extension  of  the  scale  of  histories,  on  the  other  to  an 
undue  restraining  and  limiting  of  their  subjects.  Macaulay  took 
four  large  volumes  to  do,  nominally  at  least,  not  more  than  a  dozen 
years ;  Froude  twelve  to  cover  fifty  or  sixty ;  Grote  as  many  to 
deal  with  the  important,  but  neither  long  nor  richly  documented, 
period  of  Greek,  or  rather  Athenian,  flourishing.  To  this  has  to 
be  added  the  very  serious  drawback  that  when  examination  of 
documents  is  ranked  before  everything,  even  the  slightest  question- 
ing of  that  examination  becomes  fatal,  and  a  historian  is  discredited 
because  some  one  of  his  critics  has  found  a  document  unknown 
to  him,  or  a  flaw,  possibly  of  the  slightest  importance,  in  his  inter- 
pretation of  the  texts. 

Nevertheless  it  is  necessary  to  lay  our  account  with  this  new 
style  of  history,  and  it  is  fortunately  possible  to  admit  that  the 
gains  of  it  have  not  been  small.  Thanks  to  its  practitioners,  we 
know  infinitely  more  than  our  fathers  did,  though  it  may  not  be 
so  certain  that  we  make  as  good  a  use  of  our  knowledge.  And 
the  evil  of  multiplication  of  particulars,  like  other  evils,  brings  its 
own  cure.  The  work  of  mere  rough-hewing,  of  examination  into 
the  brute  facts,  is  being  done — has  to  no  small  extent  actually  been 
done — as  it  never  was  done  before.  The  "inedited  "  has  ceased  to 
be  inedited — is  put  on  record  for  anybody  to  examine  with  little 
trouble.  The  mere  loss  of  valuable  material,  which  has  gone  on 
in  former  ages  to  an  extent  only  partially  compensated  by  the 
welcome  destruction  of  material  that  has  no  value  at  all,  has  been 
stopped.  The  pioneers  of  the  historical  summer  (to  borrow  a 
decorative  phrase  from  Charles  of  Orleans)  have  been  very  widely 
abroad,  and  there  is  no  particular  reason  why  the  summer  itself 
should  not  come. 


CONCLUSION  475 


When  it  does  it  will  perhaps  discard  some  ways  and  fashions 
which  have  been  lately  in  vogue ;  but  it  will  assuredly  profit  by 
much  that  has  been  done  during  the  period  we  survey,  no  less  in 
form  than  in  matter.  The  methods  have  been  to  a  certain  extent 
improved,  the  examples  have  been  multiplied,  the  historical  sense 
has  certainly  taken  a  wider  and  deeper  hold  of  mankind.  Very 
little  is  wanting  but  some  one  ausus  contemnere  va-na  ;  and  when 
the  future  Thucydides  or  the  future  Carlyle  sets  to  work,  he  will 
be  freed,  by  the  labour  of  others,  alike  from  the  paucity  of  materials 
that  a  little  weakened  Thucydides,  and  from  the  brute  mass  of 
them  that  embittered  the  life  of  Carlyle. 

Not  so  much  is  to  be  said  of  the  remaining  divisions  or  depart- 
ments individually.  If  the  drama  of  the  century  is  not,  in  so  far 
as  acting  drama  is  concerned,  almost  a  blank  from  the  point  of 
view  of  literature,  the  literary  drama  of  the  century  is  almost  a 
blank  as  regards  acting  qualities.  It  is  true  that  there  have  been 
at  times  attempts  to  obtain  restitution  of  conjugal  rights  on  one  side 
or  on  the  other.  In  the  second  and  third  decades,  perhaps  a 
little  later,  a  strong  effort  was  made  to  give  vogue  to,  and  some 
vogue  was  obtained  for,  the  scholarly  if  pale  attempts  of  Milman 
and  Talfourd,  and  the  respectable  work  of  others.  Bulwer,  his 
natural  genius  assisted  by  the  stage-craft  of  Macready,  brought 
the  acting  and  the  literary  play  perhaps  nearer  together  than  any 
one  else  did.  Much  later  still,  the  mighty  authority  of  Tennyson, 
taking  to  dramatic  writing  at  the  time  when  he  was  the  unquestioned 
head  of  English  poetry  and  English  literature,  and  assisted  by  the 
active  efforts  of  the  most  popular  actor  and  manager  of  the  day, 
succeeded  in  holding  the  stage  fairly  well  with  plays  which  are 
not  very  dramatic  among  dramas,  and  which  are  certainly  not 
very  poetical  among  their  author's  poems.  With  more  recent  times 
we  have  luckily  nothing  to  do,  and  the  assertions  of  some  authors 
that  they  themselves  or  others  have  brought  back  literature  to 
the  stage  may  be  left  confronted  with  the  assertions  of  not  a  few 
actors  that,  for  reasons  which  they  do  not  themselves  profess 
entirely  to  comprehend,  a  modern  drama  is  almost  bound  not  to 


476  CONCLUSION 


be  literary  if  it  is  to  act,  and  not  to  act  if  it  is  literary.  Some 
have  boldly  solved  the  difficulty  by  hinting,  if  not  declaring,  that 
the  drama  is  an  outworn  form  except  as  mere  spectacle  or  enter- 
tainment ;  others  have  exhausted  themselves  in  solutions  of  a  less 
trenchant  kind ;  none,  it  may  safely  be  said,  has  really  solved 
it.  And  though  it  is  quite  true  that  what  has  happened  was  pre- 
dicted sixty  or  seventy  years  ago,  as  a  result  of  the  breach  of 
the  monopoly  of  Covent  Garden  and  Drury  Lane,  it  is  fair  to  say 
that  the  condition  of  the  drama  of  at  least  a  quarter  of  a  century 
earlier  had  been  little  if  at  all  better  than  it  has  been  since.  It 
is  a  simple  fact  that  since  Sheridan  we  have  had  no  dramatist  who 
combined  very  high  acting  with  very  high  literary  merit. 

Of  what  have  been  called  the  applied  departments  of  literature, 
a  somewhat  less  melancholy  account  has  to  be  given ;  but,  except 
in  their  enormous  multiplication  of  quantity,  they  present  few 
opportunities  for  remarks  of  a  general  character. 

Very  great  names  have  been  added  to  the  list  of  theological 
writers,  but  these  names  on  the  whole  belong  to  the  earlier  rather 
than  to  the  later  portion  of  the  period,  and  even  then  something 
of  a  change  has  been  observable  in  the  kinds  of  their  writing. 
The  sermon,  that  is  to  say  the  literary  sermon,  has  become  more 
and  more  uncommon ;  and  the  popular  ear  which  calls  upon  itself 
to  hear  sermons  at  all  prefers  usually  what  are  styled  practical 
discourses,  often  deviating  very  considerably  from  the  sermon 
norm,  or  else  extremely  florid  addresses  modelled  on  later  Con- 
tinental patterns,  and  having  as  a  rule  few  good  literary  qualities. 
So,  too,  the  elaborate  theological  treatise  has  gone  out  of  fashion, 
and  it  may  be  doubted  whether,  at  least  for  the  last  half  century, 
a  single  book  of  the  kind  has  been  added  to  the  first  class  of 
Anglican  theological  writing.  This  writing  has  thus  taken  the 
form  either  of  discourses  of  the  older  kind,  maintained  in  existence 
by  endowment  or  by  old  prescription,  such  as  the  Bampton 
Lectures,  or  of  rather  popular  polemics,  or  of  what  may  be  called 
without  disrespect  theological  journalism  of  various  kinds.  The 
general  historical  energy  of  the  century,  moreover,  has  not  dis- 


xil  CONCLUSION  477 

played  itself  least  in  the  theological  department,  and  valuable 
additions  have  been  made,  not  merely  to  general  church  history, 
but  to  a  vast  body  of  biography  and  journal-history,  as  well  as  to 
a  certain  amount  of  Biblical  scholarship.  In  this  latter  direction 
English  scholars  have  distinguished  themselves  by  somewhat  less 
violation  of  the  rules  of  criticism  in  general  than  their  foreign 
brethren  and  masters.  But  it  cannot  be  said  that  the  nineteenth 
century  is  ever  likely  to  rank  high  in  the  history  of  English 
theology.  Even  its  greatest  names — Irving,  Chalmers,  the  Oxford 
leaders,  and  others,  with  perhaps  the  single  exception  of  Newman 
— are  important  much  more  personally  and  as  influences  than  as 
literary  figures  ;  while  the  rank  and  file,  putting  history  aside,  have 
been  distinctly  less  noteworthy  than  in  any  of  the  three  preceding 
centuries. 

The  "handmaid  of  theology"  has  received,  at  any  rate  during 
the  first  half  of  the  period,  or  even  the  first  three-quarters, 
more  distinguished  attentions  than  her  mistress  ;  and  the  additions 
made  to  the  list  headed  by  Erigena  and  Anselm,  if  we  allow  Latin 
to  count,  by  Bacon  and  Hobbes,  if  we  stick  to  the  vernacular, 
have  been  many  and  great.  Yet  it  would  not  be  unreasonable 
laudation  of  times  past  to  say  that  there  hardly,  after  Hume's 
death,  arose  any  philosopher  who  combined  the  originality, 
the  acuteness,  and  the  literary  skill  of  Hume  during  the  first 
half  of  this  century,  while  certainly,  at  least  till  within  a  period 
forbidden  to  our  scheme,  the  latter  part  of  the  time  has  not  seen 
any  writer  who  could  vie  even  with  those  of  the  earlier.  To 
a  certain  extent  the  historical  and  critical  tendencies  so  often 
noticed  have  here  been  unfortunate,  inasmuch  as  they  have 
diverted  philosophical  students  from  original  writing — or  at  least 
from  writing  as  original  as  the  somewhat  narrow  and  self-repeating 
paths  of  philosophy  admit  —  to  historical  and  critical  exercises. 
But  there  is  also  no  doubt  that  the  immense  authority  which  the 
too  long  neglected  writers  of  Germany  attained,  a  little  before  the 
middle  of  the  century,  has  been  unfortunate  in  at  least  one  respect, 
if  not  also  in  others.  The  ignorant  contempt  of  technicalities,  and 


478  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

the  determination  to  refer  all  things  to  common  sense  employing 
common  language,  which  distinguished  the  eighteenth  century  with 
us,  was  certain  to  provoke  a  reaction ;  and  this  reaction,  assisted 
by  imitation  of  the  Germans,  produced  in  the  decades  from  1840 
onwards  an  ever  increasing  tendency  among  English  philosophers 
or  students  of  philosophy  to  employ  a  jargon  often  as  merely 
technical  as  the  language  of  the  schoolmen,  and  not  seldom  far 
emptier  of  any  real  argument.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  if 
the  rough  methods  of  Hobbes  with  a  terminology  far  less  fallacious, 
were  employed  with  this  jargon,  it  would  look  much  poorer  than 
Bramhall's  scholasticisms  look  in  the  hands  of  the  redoubtable 
Nominalist.  Fortunately  of  late  there  have  been  more  signs  than 
one  of  yet  another  turn  of  tide,  and  of  a  fresh  appeal  to  the  communis 
sensus,  not  it  may  be  hoped  of  the  obstinately  and  deafly  exoteric 
character  of  the  eighteenth  century,  but  such  as  will  refuse  to 
pay  itself  with  words,  and  will  exercise  a  judicious  criticism  in  a 
language  understanded  of  all  educated  people.  Then,  and  not 
till  then,  we  may  expect  to  meet  philosophy  that  is  literature  and 
literature  that  is  philosophic. 

Science,  that  is  to  say  physical  science,  which  has  sometimes 
openly  boasted  itself  as  about  to  take,  and  has  much  more  com- 
monly made  silent  preparations  for  taking,  the  place  both  of  phil- 
osophy and  of  theology,  will  hardly  be  said  by  the  hardiest  of  her 
adherents  to  have  done  very  much  to  justify  these  claims  to  seats 
not  yet  quite  vacant  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  purely  literary 
critic.  We  have  had  some  excellent  scientific  writers,  from  Bishop 
Watson  to  Professor  Huxley ;  and  some  of  the  books  of  the 
century  which  would  deserve  remembrance  and  reading,  whatever 
their  subject  matter,  have  been  books  of  science.  Yet  it  is 
scarcely  rash  to  assert  that  the  essential  characteristics  of  science 
and  the  essential  characteristics  of  literature  are,  if  not  so  dia- 
metrically opposed  as  some  have  thought,  at  any  rate  very  far 
apart  from  one  another.  Literature  can  never  be  scientific ;  and 
though  science  may  be  literary,  yet  it  is  rather  in  the  fashion  in 
which  a  man  borrows  some  alien  vesture  in  order  to  present 


xii  CONCLUSION  479 

himself,  in  compliance  with  decency  and  custom,  at  a  foreign 
court.  Mathematics  give  us  the  example — perhaps  the  only 
example — of  pure  science,  of  what  all  science  would  be  if  it 
could,  and  of  what  it  approaches,  ever  more  nearly,  as  far  as  it  can. 
It  is  needless  to  say  that  the  perfect  presentation  of  mathematics 
is  in  pure  symbols,  divested  of  all  form  and  colour,  of  all  personal 
tincture  and  bias.  And  it  should  be  equally  superfluous  to  add 
that  it  is  in  form  and  colour,  in  suggestion  of  sound  rather  than 
in  precise  expression  and  sense,  in  personal  bias  and  personal 
tincture,  that  not  merely  the  attraction  but  the  very  essence  of 
literature  consists. 

By  so  much  as  verbal  science  or  scholarship,  which  would 
seem  to  be  more  especially  bound  to  be  literature,  claims  to  be  and 
endeavours  to  be  strictly  scientific,  by  so  much  also  necessarily 
does  it  divorce  itself  from  the  literature  which  it  studies.  This,  if 
not  an  enormously  great,  is  certainly  rather  a  sore  evil ;  and  it  is 
one  of  the  most  considerable  and  characteristic  signs  of  the  period 
we  are  discussing.  The  older  scholarship,  though  sufficiently 
minute,  still  clung  to  the  literary  side  proper :  it  was  even,  in  the 
technical  dialect  of  one  of  the  universities,  opposed  to  "  science," 
which  word  indeed  was  itself  used  in  a  rather  technical  way. 
The  invention  of  comparative  philology,  with  its  even  more 
recent  off-shoot  phonetics,  has  changed  all  this,  and  we  now  find 
"  linguistic  "  and  "  literary  "  used  by  common  consent  as  things 
not  merely  different  but  hostile,  with  a  further  tendency  on  the 
part  of  linguistics  to  claim  the  term  "  scholarship  "  exclusively  for 
itself. 

This  could  hardly  in  any  case  be  healthy.  What  may  be  the 
abstract  value  of  the  science,  or  group  of  sciences,  called  philology, 
it  is  perhaps  not  necessary  here  to  inquire.  It  is  sufficient  to  say 
that  it  clearly  has  nothing  to  do  with  literature  except  in  acci- 
dental and  remote  applications,  that  it  stands  thereto  much  as 
geology  does  to  architecture.  Unfortunately,  while  the  scientific 
side  of  scholarship  is  thus  becoming,  if  it  has  not  become,  wholly 
unliterary,  the  aesthetic  side  has  shown  signs  of  becoming,  to  far 


480  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

too  great  an  extent,  unscientific  in  the  bad  and  baneful  sense. 
With  some  honourable  exceptions,  we  find  critics  of  literature  too 
often  divided  into  linguists  who  seem  neither  to  think  nor  to  be 
capable  of  thinking  of  the  meaning  or  the  melody,  of  the  individual 
and  technical  mastery,  of  an  author,  a  book,  or  a  passage,  and 
into  loose  aesthetic  rhetoricians  who  will  sometimes  discourse  on 
/Eschylus  without  knowing  a  second  aorist  from  an  Attic  perfect, 
and  pronounce  eulogies  or  depreciations  on  Virgil  without  having 
the  faintest  idea  whether  there  is  or  is  not  any  authority  for 
quamvis  with  one  mood  rather  than  another.  Nor  is  it  possible 
to  see  what  eirenicon  is  likely  to  present  itself  between  two 
parties,  of  whom  the  extremists  on  the  one  side  may  justly 
point  to  such  things  as  have  here  been  quoted,  while  the  ex- 
tremists on  the  other  feel  it  a  duty  to  pronounce  phonetics  the 
merest  "  hariolation,"  and  a  very  large  part  of  what  goes  by 
the  name  of  philology  ingenious  guesswork,  some  of  which  may 
possibly  not  be  false,  but  hardly  any  of  which  can  on  principles  of 
sound  general  criticism  be  demonstrated  to  be  true.  It  is  not 
wonderful,  though  it  is  in  the  highest  degree  unhealthy,  that  the 
stricter  scholars  should  be  more  or  less  scornfully  relinquishing 
the  province  of  literary  criticism  altogether,  while  the  looser 
aesthetics  consider  themselves  entitled  to  neglect  scholarship  in 
any  proper  sense  with  a  similarly  scornful  indifference. 

It  is,  however,  impossible  that  offences  of  this  sort  should  not 
come  now  and  then  in  th°  history  of  literature,  and  fortunately,  in 
that  history,  they  disappear  as  they  appear.  For  the  present 
purpose  it  is  more  important  to  conclude  this  conclusion  with  a 
few  general  remarks  on  the  past,  fewer  on  the  present,  and  fewest 
of  all  on  the  future. 

On  this  last  head,  indeed,  no  words  were  perhaps  even  better 
than  even  fewest ;  though  something  of  the  sort  may  be  expected. 
Rash  as  prophecy  always  is,  it  is  never  quite  so  rash  as  in  litera- 
ture ;  and  though  we  can  sometimes,  looking  backward,  say- 
perhaps  even  then  with  some  rashness — that  such  and  such  a 
change  might  or  ought  to  have  been  expected,  it  is  very  seldom 


xil  CONCLUSION  481 

that  we  can,  when  deprived  of  this  illegitimate  advantage,  vatici- 
nate on  such  subjects  with  any  safety.  Yet  the  study  of  the 
present  always,  so  to  speak,  includes  and  overlaps  something  of 
the  future,  and  by  comparison  at  least  of  other  presents  we  can 
discern  what  it  is  at  least  not  improbable  that  the  future  may  be. 
What,  then,  is  the  present  of  literature  in  England  ? 

It  can  be  described  with  the  greater  freedom  that,  as  con- 
stantly repeated,  we  are  not  merely  at  liberty  ex  hypothesi  to  omit 
references  to  individuals,  but  are  ex  hypothesi  bound  to  exclude 
them.  And  no  writer,  as  it  happens  rather  curiously,  of  any- 
thing like  great  promise  or  performance  who  was  born  later  than 
the  beginning  of  the  fifties  passed  away  before  the  close  of  the 
century,  while  every  one  of  its  greatest  writers,  and  almost  all  of 
the  second  class,  born  in  the  first  quarter,  disappeared  before 
that  close.  By  putting  these  simple  and  unmistakable  facts 
together  it  will  be  seen,  in  a  fashion  equally  free  from  liability  to 
cavil  and  from  disobliging  glances  towards  persons,  that  the 
present  is  at  best  a  stationary  state  in  our  literary  history.  Were 
we  distinctly  on  the  mounting  hand,  it  is,  on  the  general  calcula- 
tion of  the  liabilities  of  human  life,  certain  that  we  must  have  had 
our  Shelley  or  our  Keats  side  by  side  with  our  Wordsworth  and 
our  Coleridge.  That  we  have  much  excellent  work  is  certain ; 
that  we  have  much  of  the  absolutely  first  class  not  so.  And  if 
we  examine  even  the  good  work  of  our  younger  writers  we  shall 
find  in  much  of  it  two  notes  or  symptoms — one  of  imitation  or 
exaggeration,  the  other  of  uncertain  and  eccentric  quest  for 
novelty — which  have  been  already  noted  above  as  signs  of  decad- 
ence or  transition. 

Whether  it  is  to  be  transition  or  decadence,  that  is  the 
question.  For  the  solution  of  it  we  can  only  advance  with  safety 
a  few  considerations,  such  as  that  in  no  literary  history  have 
periods  of  fresh  and  first-rate  production  ever  continued  longer 
than — that,  they  have  seldom  continued  so  long  as — the  period 
now  under  notice,  and  that  it  is  reasonable,  it  is  almost  certain, 
that,  though  by  no  means  an  absolutely  dead  season,  yet  a  period 


482  CONCLUSION 


of  comparatively  faint  life  and  illustration  should  follow.  To 
this  it  may  be  added  as  a  consideration  not  without  philosophical 
weight,  that  the  motives,  the  thoughts,  the  hopes,  the  fears, 
perhaps  even  the  manners,  which  have  defrayed  the  expense  of 
the  literary  production  of  this  generation,  together  with  the 
literary  forms  in  which,  according  to  custom,  they  have  embodied 
and  ensconced  themselves,  have  been  treated  with  unexampled, 
certainly  with  unsurpassed,  thoroughness,  and  must  now  be  near 
exhaustion ;  while  it  is  by  no  means  clear  that  any  fresh  set  is 
ready  to  take  their  place.  It  is  on  this  last  point,  no  doubt,  that 
the  more  sanguine  prophets  would  like  to  fight  the  battle,  urging 
that  new  social  ideas,  and  so  forth,  are  in  possession  of  the  ground. 
But  this  is  not  the  field  for  that  battle. 

In  dealing  with  what  has  been,  with  the  secular  hour  that  we 
have  actually  and  securely  had,  we  are  on  far  safer,  if  not  on 
positively  safe  ground.  Here  the  sheaves  are  actually  reaped  and 
brought  home ;  and  if  the  teller  of  them  makes  a  mistake,  his 
judgment,  and  his  judgment  only,  need  be  at  fault.  Not  all  ways 
of  such  telling  are  of  equal  value.  It  may  be  tempting,  for  instance, 
but  can  hardly  be  very  profitable,  to  attempt  to  strike  an  exact 
balance  between  the  production  of  the  century  from  1780  to  1880 
with  that  of  the  other  great  English  literary  century  from  1580  to 
1680.  Dear  as  the  exercise  is  to  some  literary  accountants,  there 
is  perhaps  no  satisfactory  system  of  book-keeping  by  which  we 
can  really  set  the  assets  and  the  liabilities  of  the  period  from  the 
appearance  of  Spenser  to  the  death  of  Browne  against  the  assets 
and  liabilities  of  that  from  the  appearance  of  Burns  to  the  death 
of  Tennyson,  and  say  which  has  the  greater  sum  to  its  credit. 
Still  more  vague  and  futile  would  it  be  to  attempt  to  set  with  any 
exactness  this  balance-sheet  against  that  of  the  other  great  literary 
periods  of  other  countries,  languages,  and  times.  Here  again,  most 
emphatically,  accuracy  of  this  kind  is  not  to  be  expected. 

But  what  we  can  say  with  confidence  and  profit  is  that  the 
nineteenth  century  in  England  and  English  is  of  these  great 
periods,  and  of  the  greatest  of  them  ;  that  it  has  taken  its  plare 


CONCLUSION  483 


finally  and  certainly,  with  a  right  never  likely  to  be  seriously 
challenged,  and  in  a  rank  never  likely  to  be  much  surpassed. 

The  period  which  lisped  its  numbers  in  Burns  and  Blake  and- 
Cowper,  which  broke  out  into  full  song  with  Wordsworth,  Cole- 
ridge, Scott,  Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats,  which,  not  to  mention 
scores  of  minor  singers,  took  up  the  tale  with  Tennyson  and 
Browning  and  passed  it  on  to  Arnold,  Rossetti,  Mr.  Morris,  and 
Mr.  Swinburne,  need  fear  no  comparisons  in  the  matter  of  poetry. 
In  prose  fiction,  as  we  have  seen,  it  stands  alone.  It  is  almost  a 
century  of  origins  as  regards  the  most  important  kinds  ;  it  is  quite 
a  century  of  capital  and  classical  performance  in  them.  In 
"  making  " — prose  or  verse — no  time  leaves  record  of  performance 
more  distinguished  or  more  various. 

That  in  one  great  literary  kind,  drama,  it  exhibits  lamentable 
deficiency,  that  indeed  in  that  kind  it  hardly  counts  at  all,  has 
been  admitted ;  and  it  is  not  probable  that  in  any  of  the  serious 
prose  kinds,  except  history,  it  will  ever  rank  very  high  when 
compared  with  others.  Its  theology  has,  as  far  as  literature  is 
concerned,  been  a  little  wanting  in  dignity,  in  finish,  and  even  in 
fervour,  its  philosophy  either  commonplace  or  jargonish,  its 
exercises  in  science  and  scholarship  ever  divorcing  themselves 
further  from  literary  ideals.  But  in  the  quality  of  its  miscellane- 
ous writing,  as  well  as  in  the  facilities  given  to  such  writing  by  its 
special  growth  —  some  would  say  its  special  fungus — of  the 
periodical,  it  again  rises  to  the  first  class.  Hardly  the  period  of 
Montaigne  and  Bacon,  certainly  not  that  of  Dryden,  Cowley,  and 
Temple,  nor  that  of  Addison  and  Steele,  nor  that  of  Johnson  and 
Goldsmith,  can  vie  with  the  century  of  Charles  Lamb  and  William 
Hazlitt,  of  Leigh  Hunt  and  Thomas  de  Quincey,  of  Macaulay  and 
Thackeray  and  Carlyle,  of  Arnold  and  Mr.  Ruskin.  Miscellane- 
ous we  have  been, — perhaps  too  much  so, — but  \ve  should  be  a 
little  saved  by  the  excellence  of  some  of  our  miscellanists. 

Pessimists  would  probably  say  that  the  distinguishing  and  not 
altogether  favourable  notes  of  the  century  are  a  somewhat  vagabond 
curiosity  in  matter  and  a  tormented  unrest  of  style.  The  former 


484  CONCLUSION  CHAP. 

concerns  us  little,  and  is  chiefly  noticeable  here  because  of  the 
effect  which  it  has  had  on  the  great  transformation  of  historical 
writing  so  often  noticed ;  the  latter  concerns  us  intimately.  And 
no  doubt  there  is  hardly  a  single  feature — not  even  the  growth 
of  the  novel,  not  even  the  development  of  the  newspaper — which 
will  so  distinctly  and  permanently  distinguish  this  century  in 
English  literary  history  as  the  great  changes  which  have  come 
over  style,  and  especially  prose  style.  There  has  been  less 
opportunity  to  notice  these  collectively  in  any  of  the  former 
chapters  than  there  has  been  to  notice  some  other  changes :  nor 
was  this  of  much  importance,  for  the  present  is  the  right  place  for 
gathering  up  the  fragments. 

The  change  of  style  in  prose  is  undoubtedly  as  much  the 
leading  feature  of  the  century  as  is  in  poetry  the  change  of  thought 
and  outlook,  on  which  latter  enough  perhaps  has  been  said 
elsewhere ;  the  whole  of  our  two  long  chapters  on  poetry  being 
indeed,  with  great  part  of  this  conclusion,  a  continuous  exposi- 
tion of  it.  But  the  change  in  prose  was  neither  confined  to, 
nor  specially  connected  with,  any  single  department  of  literature. 
Indirectly  indeed,  and  distantly,  it  may  be  said  to  have  been 
connected  with  the  growth  of  the  essay  and  the  popularity  of 
periodicals ;  and  yet  it  is  not  quite  certain  that  this  was  anything 
more  than  a  coincidence  due  to  the  actual  fact  that  the  first 
extensive  practitioners  of  ornate  prose,  Wilson  and  De  Quincey, 
were  in  a  way  journalists. 

That  the  sudden  ornateness,  in  part  a  mere  ordinary  reaction, 
was  also  in  part  due  to  a  reflection  of  the  greater  gorgeousness  of 
poetry,  though  it  was  in  itself  less  a  matter  of  thought  than  of 
style,  is  true.  But  literary  reactions  are  always  in  part  at  least 
literary  developments  ;  and  after  the  prose  of  Burke  and  Gibbon, 
even  after  that  of  Johnson,  it  was  certain  that  the  excessive  plain- 
ness reached  in  the  mid-eighteenth  century  would  be  exchanged 
for  something  else.  But  it  could  not  possibly  have  been  anti- 
cipated that  the  change  would  exhibit  the  extent  or  the  variety 
that  it  has  actually  shown. 


CONCLUSION  485 


That  it  has  enriched  English  literature  with  a  great  deal  of 
admirable  matter  is  certain ;  that  it  has  not  merely  produced  a 
great  deal  of  sad  stuff,  but  has  perhaps  inflicted  some  permanent 
or  at  least  lasting  damage  on  the  purity,  the  simplicity,  and  in  the 
best  sense  the  strength  of  style,  is  at  least  equally  certain.  It  is 
less  easy  to  say  whether  it  is,  as  a  movement,  near  its  close,  or 
with  what  sort  of  reaction  it  is  likely  to  be  followed.  On  the  one 
hand  the  indication  of  particular  follies  and  excesses  may  not  seem 
decisive ;  for  there  is  little  doubt  that  in  all  the  stages  of  this 
flamboyant  movement — from  De  Quincey  to  Carlyle,  from  Carlyle 
to  Mr.  Ruskin,  from  Mr.  Ruskin  to  persons  whom  it  is  unneces- 
sary to  mention — the  advocates  of  the  sober  styles  thought  and 
said  that  the  force  of  extravagance  could  no  further  go,  and  that 
the  last  outrages  had  been  committed  on  the  dignity  and  simplic- 
ity of  English.  On  the  other  hand  there  are  signs,  which  are  very 
unlikely  to  deceive  the  practised  critic,  tending  to  show  that  the 
mode  is  likely  to  change.  When  actual  frippery  is  seen  hanging 
up  in  Monmouth  Street  or  Monmouth  Street's  successors,  when 
cheap  imitations  of  fashionable  garments  crowd  the  shop  windows 
and  decorate  the  bodies  of  the  vulgar — then  the  wise  know 
that  this  fashion  will  shortly  change.  And  certainly  something 
similar  may  be  observed  in  literature  to-day.  Cacophony  jostles 
preciousness  in  novel  and  newspaper;  attempts  at  contorted 
epigram  appear  side  by  side  with  slips  showing  that  the  writer  has 
not  the  slightest  knowledge  of  the  classics  in  the  old  sense,  and 
knows  exceedingly  little  of  anything  that  can  be  called  classic  in 
the  widest  possible  acceptation  of  the  term.  Tyrannies  cease  when 
the  cobblers  begin  to  fear  them ;  fashions,  especially  literary 
fashions,  when  the  cobblers  take  them  up. 

Yet  the  production  of  what  must  or  may  be  called  literature  is 
now  so  large,  and  in  consequence  of  the  spread  of  what  is  called 
education  the  appetite  so  largely  exceeds  the  taste  for  it,  that  it  is 
not  so  easy  as  it  would  once  have  been  to  forecast  the  extent  and 
validity  of  any  reaction  that  may  take  place. 

If,  without  undue  praising  of  times  past,    without  pleading 


486  CONCLUSION 


guilty  to  the  prejudices  sometimes  attributed  to  an  academic 
education,  and  also  without  trespassing  beyond  the  proper  limits  of 
this  book,  it  may  be  permitted  to  express  an  opinion  on  the 
present  state  of  English  literature,  that  opinion,  while  it  need 
not  be  very  gloomy,  can  hardly  be  very  sanguine.  And  one 
ground  for  discouragement,  which  very  especially  concerns  us,  lies 
in  the  fact  that  on  the  whole  we  are  now  too  "  literary."  Not,  as 
has  been  said,  that  the  general  taste  is  too  refined,  but  that  there 
is  a  too  indiscriminate  appetite  in  the  general ;  not  that  the  actual 
original  force  of  our  writers  is,  with  rare  exceptions,  at  all  alarming, 
but  that  a  certain  amount  of  literary  craftsmanship,  a  certain 
knowledge  of  the  past  and  present  of  literature,  is  with  us  in  a 
rather  inconvenient  degree.  The  public  demands  quantity,  not 
quality ;  and  it  is  ready,  for  a  time  at  any  rate,  to  pay  for  its 
quantity  with  almost  unheard  of  returns,  both,  as  the  homely  old 
phrase  goes,  in  praise  and  in  pudding.  And  the  writer,  though 
seldom  hampered  by  too  exact  an  education  in  form,  has  had 
books,  as  a  rule,  too  much  with  him.  Sometimes  he  simply 
copies,  and  knows  that  he  copies ;  oftener,  without  knowing  it,  he 
follows  and  imitates,  while  he  thinks  that  he  is  doing  original 
work. 

And  worse  than  all  this,  the  abundance  of  reading  has  created 
an  altogether  artificial  habit — a  habit  quite  as  artificial  as  any 
that  can  ever  have  prevailed  at  other  periods — of  regarding  the 
main  stuff  and  substance  of  literature.  Much  reading  of  novels, 
which  are  to  the  ordinary  reader  his  books,  and  his  only  books, 
has  induced  him  to  take  their  standards  as  the  standards  of  both 
nature  and  life.  And  this  is  all  the  more  dangerous  because  in 
all  probability  the  writers  of  these  very  novels  have  themselves 
acquired  their  knowledge,  formed  their  standards,  in  a  manner 
little  if  at  all  more  first-hand.  We  have  nature,  not  as  Jones  or 
or  Brown  saw  it  for  himself,  but  as  he  saw  it  through  the  spectacles 
of  Mr.  Ruskin  or  of  Jefferies ;  art,  not  as  he  saw  it  himself,  but 
as  he  saw  it  through  those  of  Mr.  Ruskin  ao;ain  or  of  Mr.  Pater ; 
literary  criticism  as  he  learnt  it  from  Mr.  Arnold  or  from  Sainte- 


XII  CONCLUSION  487 

Beuve;  criticism  of  life  as  he  took  it  from  Thackeray  or  from 
Mr.  Meredith. 

Something  like  this  has  occurred  at  least  three  times  before  in 
the  history  of  European  literature.  It  happened  in  late  Grseco- 
Roman  times,  and  all  the  world  knows  what  the  cure  was  then, 
and  how  the  much-discussed  barbarian  cleared  the  mind  of 
Europe  of  its  literary  cant  by  very  nearly  clearing  out  all  the 
literature  as  well.  It  happened  on  a  much  smaller  scale,  and  with 
a  less  tremendous  purgation,  at  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
when  the  world  suddenly,  as  it  were,  shut  up  one  library  and 
opened  another ;  and  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  and  beginning 
of  the  eighteenth  centuries,  when  it  shut  both  of  these  or  the  greater 
part  of  them,  and  took  to  a  small  bookshelf  of  "classics,"  a 
slender  stock  of  carefully  observed  formulae  and — common  sense. 

What  it  will  take  to  now,  nobody  can  say  ;  but  that  it  will  in 
one  fashion  or  another  change  most  of  its  recent  wear,  shut  most 
of  its  recent  books,  and  perhaps  give  itself  something  of  a  holiday 
from  literature,  except  in  scholastic  shapes,  may  be  not  quite 
impossible.  Our  Lyrical  Ballads  may  be  due  early  in  the 
twentieth  century  :  it  pretty  certainly  did  not  come  before  the 
end  of  the  nineteenth.  But  whether  it  does  come  or  does  not, 
the  moment  is  certainly  no  bad  one,  even  if  chronology  did 
not  make  it  inviting,  for  setting  in  order  the  actual,  the  certain, 
the  past  and  registered  production  of  the  century  since  the  dawn 
of  the  great  change  which  ended  its  vigil.  The  historian,  as  he 
closes  his  record,  is  only  too  conscious  of  the  objections  to 
omission  that  may  probably  be  brought  against  him,  and  of  those 
of  too  liberal  admission  which  certainly  will  be  brought.  It  is 
possible  that  for  some  tastes  even  this  chapter  may  not  contain 
enough  of  Tendenz-discussion,  that  they  may  miss  the  broader 
sweeps  and  more  confident  generalisations  of  another  school 
ot  criticism.  But  the  old  objection  to  fighting  with  armour 
which  you  have  not  proved  has  always  seemed  a  sound  one,  and 
has  seldom  failed  to  be  justified  of  those  who  set  it  at  nought. 
Careful  arrangement  of  detail  and  premiss,  cautious  drawing  of 


CONCLUSION  CHAP. 


conclusions,  and  constant  subjection  of  these  conclusions  to  that 
process  of  literary  comparison  which  I  believe  to  be  the  strongest, 
the  safest,  the  best  engine  of  literary  criticism  altogether — these 
are  the  things  which  I  have  endeavoured  to  observe  here.  It 
might  have  shown  greater  strength  of  mind  to  reject  a  large 
number  of  the  authors  here  named,  and  so  bring  the  matter  into 
case  for  more  extended  treatment  of  interesting  individuals.  But 
there  is  something,  as  it  seems  to  me,  a  little  presumptuous  in 
a  too  peremptory  anticipation  of  the  operations  of  Time  the 
Scavenger.  The  critic  may  pretty  well  foresee  the  operations  of  the 
wallet-bearer,  but  he  is  not  to  dictate  to  him  the  particular  "alms 
for  oblivion  "  which  he  shall  give.  As  it  used  to  be  the  custom 
for  a  dramatic  author,  even  though  damned,  to  have  his  entrees 
at  the  theatre,  so  those  who  have  once  made  an  actual  figure 
on  the  literary  stage  are  entitled,  until  some  considerable  time  has 
elapsed,  to  book-room.  They  lose  it  gradually  and  almost 
automatically  ;  and  as  I  have  left  out  many  writers  of  the  end  of  last 
century  whom,  if  I  had  been  writing  sixty  years  since,  I  should 
doubtless  have  put  in,  many  of  the  first  half  of  it  whom  I  should 
have  admitted  if  I  had  been  writing  thirty  years  since,  so  in 
another  generation  others  will  no  doubt  exercise  a  similar 
thinning  on  my  own  passed  or  pressed  men. 

But  few,  however,  I  think,  appear  here  without  more  or  less  right 
of  admission  to  the  mind-map  of  the  century's  literature  which 
a  well-furnished  mind  should  at  this  moment  contain.  That  such 
a  mind-map,  quite  irrespective  of  examinations  and  lecture-courses, 
and  of  literary  bread-study  generally,  is  a  valuable  thing,  I  have 
no  doubt.  And  I  think,  without  wishing  to  magnify  mine  office, 
that  the  general  possession  of  it  might  do  something  to  counteract 
these  disastrous  influences  which  have  been  referred  to  a  little 
earlier.  A  man  should  surely  be  a  little  less  apt  to  take  the 
pinchbeck  poetry  of  his  own  day  for  gold  when  he  remembers  the 
Delia  Cruscans  and  Sentimentalists,  the  Montgomerys  and  the 
Tuppers  ;  the  terror-novel  and  the  Minerva  Press  should  surely  be 
useful  skeletons  to  him  at  his  feast  of  fiction  in  kinds  which  it 


CONCLUSION 


would  be  beyond  my  province  to  describe  more  particularly.  He 
will  not  clamour,  as  I  have  known  very  excellent  persons  clamour, 
for  the  "  raising  of  English  to  a  new  power  "  when  he  has  before  him 
the  long  procession  of  ingenious  jargonists  whose  jargon  has  been 
in  its  turn  hailed  as  a  revelation  and  dismissed  as  an  old  song. 
And  he  will  neither  overexalt  the  dignity  of  literature,  nor  be  a  self- 
tormentor  and  a  tormentor  of  others  about  its  approaching  decline 
and  fall,  when  he  sees  how  constantly,  how  incessantly,  the  kissed 
mouth  has  renewed  its  freshness,  the  apparently  dying  flower  has 
shed  seed  and  shot  suckers  for  a  new  growth. 


INDEX 


(ft  has  been  endeavoured  in  this  Index  to  include  the  name  (with  dates]  of  every 
author,  and  the  title  of  every  book,  discussed  in  detail.  But  in  order  to  avoid 
unnecessary  bulk,  books  and  authors  merely  referred  to,  as  well  as  parts  of 
Cooks,  are  not  usually  given.) 


Academy,  403 

Adam  Bede,  332  sq. 

Adam  Blair,  194 

Age  of  Reason,   The,  30  sq. 

Ainsworth,    Harrison    (1805-82),    138, 

139 

Alice  in   Wonderland,  336 
Alison,  Sir  Archibald  (1792-1867),  217, 

218 

Allingham,  William  (1824-89),  315 
Alton  Locke,  336  sq. 
Ancient  Law,  378 
Ancient  Mariner,    The  Rime   of  the, 

61-63 

Andromeda,  335 
Angel  in  the  House,  The,  321 
Anna  St.  Ives,  39 
Annals  of  the  Parish,  140 
Anti-Jacobin,  2 

Apologia  pro  Vita  Sud,  337,  388 
Arnold,   Matthew   (1822-88),    15,    52, 

281-287,  405-408 

Arnold,  Thomas  (1795-1842),  223,  224 
Ashe,  Thomas  (1836-89),  322 
Asolando,  271  sq. 
Atalanta  in  Calydon,  296 
Athenceum,  403 

Atherstone,  Edwin  (1788-1872),  124 
Aurora  Leigh,  280 

Austen,  Jane  (1775-1817),  43,  128-131 
Austen,  Lady,  4 

Austin,  John  (1790-1859),  377,  378 
Austin,  Sarah  (1793-1867),  361,  378 
Aytoun,  William  Edmondstoune  (1813- 

1865),  310,  311 


Bage,  Robert  (1728-1801),  41,  42 

Bagehot,  Walter  (1826-77),  4°3'  4°4 

Baillie,  Joanna  (1762-1851),  439,  440 

Balen,  A  Tale  of,  299 

Barbauld,  Mrs.  (1743-1825),  19,  62 

Barchester  Towers,  340 

Barham,   Richard  Harris  (1788-1845), 

209,  210 

Barnaby  Rudge,  149 
Barnes,  William  (1800-86),  118 
Barrow,  Sir  John  (1764-1848),  179 
Barry  Cornwall,  see  Procter,  B.  W. 
Barton,  Bernard  (1784-1849),  107 
Baynes,    Thomas    Spencer   (1823-87), 

37i 

Beckford,  William  (1759-1844),  40,  41 
Beddoes,    Thomas    Lovell    (1803-49), 

114-116 

Bells  and  Pomegranates,  270 
Bentham,    Jeremy    (1748-1832),    363, 

364 

Biographia  Borealis,  201 
Black,  William  (1841-98),  348,  349 
Blackie,  John  Stuart  (1809-95),  3°8 
Blackmore,  Richard  Doddridge  (1825- 

1900),  346,  347 
Blackwoods  Magazine,  168  sqq. 
Blake,  William  (1757-1827),  1-3,  9-13 
Bleak  House,  150 

Bloomfield,  Robert  (1766-1823),  107 
Bon  Gaultier  Ballads,  311 
Borrow,  George  (1803-81),  162,  163 
Bowles,  Caroline  (1787-1854),  65,  124 
Bowles,    William    Lisle    (1762-1850), 

19,  105-106 


492 


NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 


Brimley,  George  (1819-57),  403,  404 
Bronte,  Anne  (1820-49),  329 
Bronte,  Charlotte  (1816-55),  328-331 
Bronte,  Emily  (1818-48),  325,  329 
Brown,  Dr.  John  (1810-82),  404 
Browning,  Elizabeth  Barrett  (1809-61), 

276-281 
Browning,  Robert  (1812-89),  9°.  2°8- 

277 

Bryant,  Jacob  (1715-1804),  425 
Buckle,  Henry  Thomas  (1821-62),  243, 

244 

Bulwer,  see  Lytton 
Burges,  Sir  James  Bland  (1752-1824), 

48 

Burke,  i,  7 

Burney,  Miss  (1752-1840),  125 
Burns,    Robert  (1759-96),    1-3,   9,    10, 

13-18 

Burton,  John  Hill  (1809-81),  240 
Burton,  Sir  Richard  (1821-90),  vi. 
Byrom,  6 
Byron,  Lord  (1788-1824),  6,  75-81 

Caleb   Williams,  32  sq. 

Calverley,    Charles    Stuart   (1831-84), 

322,  323 

Campbell,  Mr.  Dykes,  57 
Campbell,  Thomas  (1777-1844),  92-94 
Canning,  George  (1770-1827'),  19 
Carlyle,  Thomas  (1795-1881),  232-240 
"Carroll,  Lewis,"  356,  357 
Gary,  Henry  (1772-1844),  no 
Castle  Rackrent,  127 
Chalmers,   Thomas  (1780-1847),    394, 

395 

Chambers,  Robert  (1802-71),  434 
Chamfer,  Captain,  159 
Chartism,  235  sqq. 
Chastelard,  296 
Christabel,  61-63 
Christian  Year,  382-384 
"  Christopher  North,"  see  Wilson,  John 
Church,  Richard  (1815-90),  391 
Churchill,  3,  5 

City  of  Dreadful  Night,  The,  306 
Clive,  Mrs.  Archer  (1801-73),  310 
Cloister  and  the  Hearth,  The,  342 
Clough,  Arthur  Hugh  (1819-61),  316, 

3i7 
Cobbett,  William  (1762-1835),  2,  168- 

172 
Coleridge,  Hartley  (1796-1849),  51, 

200-203 


Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor  (1772-1834), 

56-63 

Coleridge,  Sara  (1802-52),  119 
Collins,  Charles  Alston  (1828-73),  351 
Collins,  Mortimer  (1827-76),  315,  351 
Collins,  Wilkie  (1824-89),  351 
Combe,  William  (1741-1823),  47 
Confessions  of  a  Justified  Sinner,  100 
Confessions  of  an  English  Opium-Eater, 

MS  W. 
Congreve,  6 

Conington,  John  (1825-69),  427,  428 
Comhill  Magazine,  402 
"  Corn-Law  Rhymer,  The,'  see  Elliott, 

Ebenezer 

Cornwall,  Barry,  see  Procter,  B.  W. 
Cory,  William,  see  Johnson,  William 
Cottle,  Joseph  (1770-1853),  57 
Cowper,  William  (1731-1800),  1-7 
Coxe,  Archdeacon,  252  note 
Crabbe,  George  (1754-1832),  1-3,  7-9 
Craik,  Dinah  Maria  (1826-87),  354 
Cranford,  353 
Creighton,    Mandell   (1843-1901),   252 

note 

Croker,  Crofton  (1798-1854),  141,  204 
Croker,  John  Wilson  (1780-1857),  403 
Crotchet  Castle,  162 
Cruise  upon   Wheels,  ^,351 
Cumberland,  Richard  (1732-1811),  42 
Cunningham,  Allan  (1784-1842),  108 
Curiosities  of  Literature,  179 

Daniel  Deronda,  334 
D'Arblay,  Madame  (1752-1840),  125 
Darley,  George  (1795-1846),  114 
Darwin,    Charles    Robert    (1809-82), 

432-434 
Darwin,  Erasmus  (1731-1802),   3,    19, 

432 

David  Copperfield,  150 
Davy,  Sir  Humphry  (1778-1829),  430, 

43i 

Death 's  Jest- Book ,  115 
Defence  of  Guenn'cn-,   The,  292 
"  Delia  Crusca,"  sec  Merry 
"  Delta,"  see  Moir,  D.  M. 
De    Quinccy,     Thomas     (1785-1859), 

194-198 

De  Tabley,  Lord  (I835-951!,  321 
Dickens,  Charles  (1812-70),  145-151 
Digby,  Kenelm,  vi. 

Disraeli,  Benjamin  (1804-81),  160,  161 
Disraeli,  Isaac  (1766-1848),  179 


INDEX 


493 


Dobell,  Sydney  (1824-74),  312-314 
Dodgson,  Charles  Lutwidge  (1833-98), 

see  "Carroll,  Lewis" 
Dombey  and  Son,  149 
Domett,  Alfred  (1811-87),  310 
Doyle,  Sir  Francis  (1810-88),  206 
Dramatis  Persona;,  271  s</y. 
Dream  of  Gerontius,   The,  387 
Dryden,  5,  8 

Dufferin,  Lady  (1807-67),  325 
Dunbar,  9 

Earthly  Paradise,  The,  293 
Edgeworth,    Maria   (1767-1849),    126- 

128 

Edinburgh  Review,  167  sqq. 
Eli  a,   The  Essays  of ,  182 
Eliot,  George,  see  Evans,  Mary  Ann 
Elliott,    Ebenezer    ("The    Corn -Law 

Rhymer  ")  (1781-1849),  no,  in 
Ellis,  George  (1753-1815),  20 
Emerson,  68 
Enoch  Arden,  265 
Eothcn,  241 

Epic  of  Women,  The,  303 
Erechtheus,  299 
Esmond,  152,  155 
Essays  and  Reviews,  393 
Essays  in  Criticism,  405 
"  Ettrick  Shepherd,"  The,  100 
Evans,  Mary  Ann  (1819-80),  325,  326, 

331-334 
Examiner,  98,  168  sq. 

Fazio,  441 

Eerguson,  Sir  Samuel  (1810-86),  310 

Fergusson,  15 

Ferrier,    James    Frederick    (1808-64), 

371 
Ferrier,  Susan  (1782-1854),  139,    140, 

37i 

Finlay,  George  (1795-1875),  252  note 
FitzGerald,    Edward    (1809-83),    207- 

209 

Forster,  John  (1812-76),  242,  243 
Fortnightly  Review,  402 
P'oster,  John  (1770-1843),  vi. 
"  Fraserians,"  The,  204 
Eraser s  Magazine,  168  sqq.,  203^7. 
Frederick  the  Great,  History  of,  235  sqq. 
Freeman,     Edward     Augustus     (1823- 

92),  244,  245 
French     Revolution,     History    of    Ike, 

234  sqq. 


Frere,  John  Hookham,  19 

Froude,    James    Anthony    (1818-94), 

246-252 
Froude,  Richard  Hurrell  (1803-36),  390 

Gait,  John  (1779-1839),  139-141 
Gamekeeper  at  Home,  The,  416 
Gaskell,  Mrs.  (1810-65),  353 
Gibbon,  i 
Gifford,   William  (1756-1826),  19,  23- 

25 

Gilpin,  William  (1724-1804),  46,  47 
Glascock,  Captain,  159 
Godwin,  William  (1756-1836),  2,  32-37 
Goldsmith,  I 
Gray,  6 

Great  Expectations,  150 
Green,   John   Richard  (1837-83),   245, 

246 

Greenwell,  Dora  (1821-82),  326 
Greville,  Charles,  vi. 
Grosart,  Dr.,  52  note 
Grote,  George  (1794-1871),  220-222 
Guy  Livingstone,  353 

Hake,     Thomas     Gordon     (1809-94), 

3°8.  3°9 

Hall,  Captain  Basil  (1788-1844),  159 
Hallam,  Henry  (1777-1859),  212-214 
Hallam,  Arthur  Henry  (1811-33),  3°7> 

308 
Hamilton,    Sir    William    (1788-1856), 

369-372 

Hannay,  James  (1827-73),  403 
Hard  Times,  150 

Haunted  and  the  Haunters,  The,  143 
Hawker,  Robert  Stephen  (1803-75), 

118 

Hayley,  William  (1745-1820),  3,  18-19 
Hay  ward,  Abraham  (1801-84),  4°3 
Hazlitt,  William  (1778-1830),  34,  184- 

187 

Head,  Sir  Edmund  (1805-68),  206 
Head,  Sir  Francis  (1793-1875),  206 
Headley,    Henry    (1765-88),    47,    106" 

note 

Heber,  Reginald  (1783-1826),  no 
Helps,  Sir  Arthur  (1813-75),  404 
Hemans,  Mrs.  (1793-1835),  112 
Henrietta  Temple,  16 1 
Heroes  and  Hero-  Worship,  235  sq. 
Hogg,  James  (1770-1835),  90-101 
Hogg,  T.  J.,  82 
Holcroft,  Thomas  ( i  74^-1809),  38,  39 


494 


NINETEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE 


Hood,  Thomas  (1799-1845),  121-124 
Hook,  Theodore  (1788-1841),  140,  141 
Hopkins,    Gerard    Manley    (1844-90), 

302 

Home,  Richard  H.  (1803-84),  117 
Home  Tooke  (1736-1812),  46 
Houghton,     Lord    (Milnes,     R.     M. ) 

(1809-85),  309,  310 
Household  Words,  399,  400 
Hughes,  Thomas  (1823-96),  355 
Hunt,  Leigh  (1784-1859),  81,  86,  88  ; 

his  verse  and  life,  98-99  ;  his  prose, 

198-200 
Huxley,    Thomas    Henry    (1825-95), 

435-  436 

Ideal  of  a  Christian  Church,  The,  391 

Idylls  of  the  King,  264,  265 

Imaginary  Conversations,  102  sq. 

Imaginary  Portraits,  419 

Ingelow,  Jean  (1820-97),  326 

Ingoldsby  Legends,   The,  210 

In  Memoriam,  262,  263 

Ion,  441 

Irving,  Edward  (1792-1834),  395 

//  is  Never  too  Late  to  A I  end,  342 

James,  G.  P.  R.  (1801-60),  138,  139 
Jameson,  Mrs.  (1794-1860),  417 
Jane  Eyre,  329,  330 
Jefferies,  John  Richard  (1848-87),  416, 

417 
Jeffrey,  Francis  (1773-1850),  71,   172- 

176 

Jerrold,  Douglas  (1803-57),  210 
Johnson,  S. ,  i,  6,  8 
Johnson,  William  (?-i892),  246 
Jones,  Ebenezer  (1820-60),  315 
Jones,  Ernest  (1819-68),  315 
Jowett,  Benjamin  (1817-93),  394 

Keats,  John  (1795-1821),  86-91 
Keble,  John  (1792-1866),  382-384 
Kinglake,    Alexander   (1809-91),   241, 

242 

Kingsley,  Charles  (1819-75),  334-338 
Kingsley,  Henry  (1830-76),  351,  352 
Knowles,  James  Sheridan  (1784-1862), 

442 
Kubla  Khan,  61-63 

Lady  of  Lyons,  The,  443 
Lamb,    Charles   ( 1775-1 834"),    13,    33, 
38,   181-184 


Lancaster,  Henry  (1829-75),  404 
Landon,  Letitia  Elizabeth,  "  L.  E.  L." 

(1802-38),  118,  119 
Landor,    Walter  Savage  (1775-1864), 

68,  101-104 

Latin  Christianity,  History  of,  220 
Latter-Day  Pamphlets,  235  sqq. 
Lawrence,  Dr.,  21 
Lawrence,    George    Alfred    (1827-76), 

352.  353 

Lays  of  Ancient  Rome,  226,  227 
Lays  of  the  Scottish  Cavaliers,  311 
Lear,  Edward  (1812-88),  322,  323 
Lee,  the  Misses,  45 
Lever,  Charles  (1806-72),  158,  159 
Levy,  Amy  (1861-89),  326 
Lewes,  George  Henry  (1817-78),  374, 

375 
Lewis,    Sir   George    Cornewall    (1806- 

1863),  206,  207 
Lewis,     Matthew    ("Monk"),    (1775- 

1818),  2,  44 

Liddon,  Henry  Parry  (1829-90),  391 
Life  and  Death  of  Jason,  The,  292,  293 
Life  Drama,  A,  313 
Lingard,  John  (1771-1851),  215 
Little  Dorrit,  150 
Lloyd  (the  elder),  3 
Lloyd,  Charles  (1775-1839),   181 
Locker,  Frederick  (1821-95),  317,  318 
Lockhart,    John    Gibson   (1794-1854), 

191-194  ;  his  Life  of  Scott,  193 
London  Magazine,  168  sqq. 
Long,  George  (1800-79),  427 
Love  is  Enough,  293 
Lyrical  Ballads,  48,  56 
Lytton,  the  first  Lord  (1803-73),   142- 

145.  442.  443 

Lytton,   Ed\vard   Robert,   first  Earl  of 
(1831-91),  318-320 

Macaulay,   Thomas    Babington  (1800- 

59),  34,  67,  68,  224-232 
M'Crie,  Thomas  (1772-1835),  216,  217 
Mackay,  Charles  (1814-89),  310 
Mackenzie,  17,   18 
Mackintosh,    Sir    James    (1765-18321, 

365 

Afacmillan's  3fagazine,  402 
Maginn,  William  (1793-1842),  203-205 
Mahon,  Lord,  see  Stanhope 
Maine,  Sir  Henry  I.  S.  11822-881,  377 

378 
Malone,  Edmund  (1741-1812),  47 


INDEX 


495 


Malthus,  Thomas  Robert  (1766-1834), 

46 
Mangan,    James    Clarence   (1803-49), 

118 
Manning,    Henry    Edward   (1808-92), 

390 
Mansel,  Henry  Longueville  (1820-71), 

372-374 

Marius  the  Epicurean,  420 
Marryat,    Frederick  (1792-1848),   157, 

158 
Marston,     Philip     Bourke    (1850-87), 

3°2,  3°S 

Marston,  Westland  (1819-90),  444 
Martin  Chuzzlewit,  149 
Martineau,  Harriet  (1802-76),  163,  164 
Mathias,  Thomas  James  (17547-1835), 

20,  23,  25-26 
Maturin,  Charles  Robert  (1782-1824), 

125,  126 
Maud,  263,  264 
Maurice,     Frederick     Denison     (1805- 

'872),  374-  395 
Maxwell,   Sir  William  Stirling  (1818- 

78),  252  note 

Melmoth  the  Wanderer,  126 
Men  and  Women,  271  sq. 
Meredith,  Mr.  George,  viii.,  343-345 
Merivale,  Charles  (1808-93),  240,  241 
Merry,  Robert  ("Delia  Crusca")(i755- 

98),  19,  24  note 
Mill,  James  (1773-1836),  365 
Mill,  John  Stuart  (1806-73),  364-369 
Miller,  Hugh  (1802-56),  434,  435 
Milman,  Henry  Hart  ( 1791-1868),  219- 

229 

Milnes,  R.  M. ,  see  Houghton,  Lord 
Minto,  William  (1845-93),  422 
Mitford,    Mary    Russell    (1787-1855), 

164,  165 

Mitford,  William  (1744-1827),  215 
Modern  British  Theatre,  437 
Modern  Painters,  409 
Moir,   D.    M.  ("Delta")  (1798-1851), 

140 

Monk,   The,  44 

Montgomery,  James  (1771-1854),  107 
Montgomery,    Robert    (1807-55),     T^7 

note 

Moore,  John  (1729-1802),  2,  26-28 
Moon-,  Thomas  ( 1779-1852),  94-98 
More,  Hannah  (1745-1833),  45 
Morris,  William  ( 1834-96),  90,  291-204 
Motherwell,  William  (1797-1835).   ioq 


Movement,  The  Oxford,  362  sq. 
Munro,  Hugh  A.  J.  (1819-85),  428 
Music  and  Moonlight,  303 

Napier,  Sir  William  (1785-1860),  212 

Newcomes,  The,  152,  155 

Newman,  Francis  William  (1805-1897), 

397  note 
Newman,  John  Henry  (1801-90),  384- 

39° 

Nicholas  Nickleby,  148 
Nodes  Ambrosiana,  188 
Noel,  Roden  (1834-94),  321,  322 
Norton,  Mrs.  (1808-77),  325 

Ode  on  Intimations  of  Immortality,  54 
O'Keefe,  John  (1747-1833),   46,   438, 

439 

Old  Curiosity  Shop,  The,  149 
Oliphant,  Laurence,  vi. 
Oliphant,  Margaret  (1828-1897),   347' 

348 
Oliver  Cromwell ' s  Letters  and  Speeches, 

235  •*?• 

Oliver  Twist,  148 
Orion,   117 
O'Shaughnessy,  Arthur  (1844-81),  302- 

304 

Our  Mutual  Friend,  150 
Our  Village,   164 

Paine,  Thomas  (1737-1809),  2,  30-32 
Palgrave,    Francis    Turner   (1824-97), 

87,  216 

Palgrave,  Sir  Francis  (1788-1861),  216 
Palgrave,  William  Gifford  (1826-88), 

216 

Pall  Mall  Gazette,  403 
Paracelsus,  269,  270 
Past  and  Present,  255  sqq. 
Patchwork,  317,  318 
Pater,  Walter  H.  (1839-94),  418-421 
Patmore,  Coventry  (1823-96),  320,  321 
Pattison,  Mark  (1813-84!,  393,  394 
Paul,  Mr.  Kegan,  34 
Paul  1' err  oil,  361 
Pauline,  269 

Payn,  James  (1830-98),  348 
Peacock,   Thomas   Love  (1785-1866) 

161,  162 
Pel  ham,  143 
Pendennis,  152,  155 
Peter  Plymli'v's  Letters,   177 
Peter  s  Letters,   iqa,  194 


496 


NINETEENTH   CENTURY  LITERATURE 


Philip  Van  Artevelde,  119 

Pickwick  Papers,   The,  146 

Pindar,  Peter,  see  Wolcot,  John 

Planche1,  James  R.  (1796-1880),  443 

Plays  on  the  Passions,  439 

Poems  and  Ballads,  296,  297  ;  second 

series,  298 

Poetical  Sketches,  10,  n 
Political  Justice,  32  sq. 
Pollock,  Sir  F.  (1815-88),  207 
Pope,  5,  7 

Person,  Richard  (1759-1808),  426,  427 
Praed,  Winthrop  Mackworth  ( 1 802-39) , 

121-124 

P  rce  lee  Hones  Academicce ,  384 
Price,  26 

Pride  and  Prejudice,  129 
Priestley,  2,  26 
Princess,   The,  261-262 
Procter,  Adelaide  Anne  (1825-64),  326 
Procter,    B.    W.    ("Barry  Cornwall") 

(1790-1874),  109 
Prolegomena  Logica,  373 
Prowse,  \V.  J.  (1836-70),  324 
Pursuits  of  Literature,   The,  25,  26 
Pusey,    Edward    Bouverie    (1800-82), 

380-382 

Pusey,  Philip  (1799-1855),  207 
Pye,  19 

Quarterly  Review,  168  sq. 
Que<n-Mother,  The,  and  Rosamond,  295 

Radcliffe,  Mrs.  (1764-1823),  2,  43,  44 
Ravenshoe,  352 

Reade,  Charles  (1814-84),  341-343 
Reeve,  Henry,  vi. 
Renaissance  in  Italy,  The,  421 
Richard  Feverel,   The  Ordeal  of,  343 
Rights  of  Man,   The,  30  sq. 
Rights  of  Woman,  The,  37,  38 
Ring  and  the  Book,   The,  271  sq. 
Robertson,   Frederick  (1816-53),    396> 

397 

Robinson,  H.  Crabb,  vi. 
Rogers,  Samuel  (1763-1855),  91,  92 
Rolliad,  The,  20,  21 
Roman  Poets  of  the  Republic,  428 
Rondtaux,  21 

Roscoe,  William  (1753-1831),  214,  215 
Rossetti,  D.  G.  (1828-82),  97,  288-291 
Rossetti,  Miss  (1830-94),  301,  302 
Ruskin,    John    (1819-1900),    v. ,    viii. , 

408-417 


Sartor  Resartus,  234  sqq. 

Saturday  Review,  400,  401 

Sayers,  Dr.  (1763-1817),  19,  45 

Sayings  and  Doings,  141 

Schiller,  Life  of,  233  sqq. 

Scots,  the  literary  virtues  of,  15  ;   poets 

in,  13-18,  108-109 
Scott,  John,  180 
Scott,  Michael  (1789-1835),  160 
Scott,  Sir  Walter  (1771-1832),  34,  63, 

69-75.  131-138 

Scott,  William  Bell  (1811-90),  310 
Seeley,  Sir  J.  R.  (1834-94),  252  note 
Sellar,  William  Young  (1825-90),  428, 

429 

Senior,  Nassau  W.  (1790-1864),  403 
Seward,  Miss  (1747-1809),   19 
Shairp,  Principal  (1819-85),  15 
Shelley,  Mrs.  (1798-1851),  38 
Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe  (1792-1822),  81- 

86 

Sidgwick,  Henry  (1838-1900),  397  note 
Sigurd  the  Volsung,  293 
Sisters,  The,  299 

Skene,  William  Forbes  (1809-92),  240 
Smedley,  Frank  E.  (1818-64),  355 
Smedley,  Menella  Bute  (1820-77),  32^ 
Smith,  Alexander  (1830-67),  312,  313 
Smith,  Sydney  (1771-1845),  176-178 
Smith,   \Villiam    Robertson  (1846-94), 

429-430 

Somerville,  Mrs.  (1780-1872),  431 
Songs  before  Sunrise,  299 
Songsof  Innocence  and  Experience,  11,12 
Sordello,  270 
Southey,    Robert    (1774-1843),    3,    13, 

63-69,  107,  no 
Spectator,  400 
Stanhope,    Philip   Henry,    Earl   (1805- 

1875),  246 

Stanley,  Arthur  Penrhyn  (1815-81),  392 
Stephen,  James  Kenneth  (1859-92),  323 
Stephen,  Sir  James  (1789-1859),  378 
Stephen,  Sir  James  Fitzjames  (1829-94), 

378 

"  Sterling  Club,"  The,  206  sq. 
Sterling,  John  (1806-44),  205,  206 
Sterling,  Life  of  John,  205,  235  sqq. 
Stevenson,    Robert     Louis    ( 18,0-94 1 

358-36i 

St.  I. eon.  34,  36 
Story  without  an  End,  A ,  361 
StrafforJ,  270 
Stubbs,  Bishop  (1825-1901'),  252  note 


INDEX 


497 


Studies  in  the  History  of  the  Renais- 
sance, 418  sqq. 

Surtees,  Robert  (  ?  -1864),  354 

Swift,  6 

Swinburne,  Mr.,  viii.,  90,  295-300 

Symonds,  John  Addington  (1840-93), 
302,  421,  422 

Syntax,  Dr.,  47 

Tale  of  Two  Cities,  A,  150 
Tales  of  a  Grandfather,  212 
Tamworth  Reading-Room,  389 
Tannahill,  Robert  (1774-1810),  108 
Taylor,  Sir  Henry  (1800-86),  119-121 
Taylor,  Thomas  (the  Platonist)  (1758- 

1835),  46 
Taylor,   William  (of   Norwich)  (1765- 

1836),  45 

Tennant,  William  (1784-1848),  109 
Tennyson,   Alfred   (1809-92),    89,    90, 

253-268 

Tennyson,  Charles  (1808-79),  3°7 
Tennyson,  Frederick  (1807-98),  307 
Thackeray,  William  Makepeace  (1811- 

63),  151-156 
Thirlwall,   Connop  (1797-1875),   220- 

222 

Thorn,  William  (1789-1848),  109 
Thomson,  James  (1834-82),  304-306 
Tracts  for  the  Times,  381 
Traill,   Henry  Duff  (1842-1900),   323, 

324 

Treasure  Island,  359 
Trench,   Richard  Chenevix  (1807-86), 

308 

Trollope,  Anthony  (1815-82),  339-341 
Trollope,  Mrs.  (1780-1863),  339 
Trollope,  Thomas  Adolphus  (1810-92), 

339 
Tupper,   Martin    Farquhar    (1810-89), 

3°7 

Turner,  Sharon  (1768-1847),  215,  216 
Twisleton,  Kdward  (1809-74),  207 
Tyndall,  John  (1820-93),  432 
Tytler,  Alexander  (1747-1813),  217 
Tytler,  Patrick  Fraser  (1791-1849),  217 
Tytler,  William  (1711-92),  217 


Uncommercial  Traveller,   The,  148 
Unto  this  Last,  411 

Vanity  Fair,  155 

Vathek,  41 

Venables,  George  S.  (1811-88),  207 

Vere,  Sir  Aubrey  de  (1788-1846),  in 

Verses  and  Translations,  323 

Vestiges  of  Creation,  434 

Virginians,  The,  155 

Wade,  Thomas  (1805-75),  113 
Wainewright,  Thomas  Griffiths  (1794- 

1852),  198 

Wakefield,  Gilbert  (1756-1801),  425 
Walpole,  i,  6 

Ward,  William  George  (1812-82),  391 
Waver  ley  Novels,  The,  131-138 
Wells,  Charles  Jeremiah  (1800-79),  113 
Westward  Ho  !  336  sq. 
Whately,  Richard  (1787-1863),  375,  376 
Whewell,  William  (1794-1866),  376 
White,  Henry  Kirke  (1785-1806),  107, 

108 

Whitehead,  Charles  (1804-62),  113 
Why te- Melville,  Major  (1821-78),  354, 

Wilberforce,    Samuel  (1805-73),   391, 

392 

William  Blake,  299 
Williams,    Helen   Maria   (1762-1827), 

29,  3° 

Williams,  Isaac  (1802-65),  390,  391 
Wilson,  John  (1785-1854),  188-191 
Wolcot,  John  ("  Peter  Pindar")  (1738- 

1819),  20,  21-23 

Wolfe,  Charles  (1791-1823),  124 
Wollstonecraft,  Mary  (1759-97).  37.  38 
Wordsworth,  Dorothy  (1771-1855),  50, 

54 
Wordsworth,  WiKiam  (1770-1850),  49- 

56 

Yeast,  326  sq. 

Yonge,  Charlotte  (1823-1901),  349-351 

Young,  Arthur  (1741-1820),  2,  28,  29 

Zeluco,  26,  27,  28 


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Printed  by  R.  &  R.  CLARK,  LIMITED,  Edinburgh. 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE. 


HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE.   In  4  Vols.   Crown  8vo. 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE  FROM  THE  BEGINNING  TO  THE 
NORMAN  CONQUEST.  By  Rev.  STOPFORD  A.  BROOKE,  M.A. 
Crown  8vo.  75.  6d. 

A   HISTORY   OF   ELIZABETHAN    LITERATURE.      1560-1665. 

By  GEORGE  SAINTSBURY,  Professor  of  Rhetoric  and  English  Litera- 
ture in  the  University  of  Edinburgh.     Crown  8vo.     7s.  6d. 

A  HISTORY  OF  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY  LITERATURE. 
1660-1780.  By  EDMUND  GOSSE,  M.A.  Crown  8vo.  73.  6d. 

A    HISTORY    OF    NINETEENTH    CENTURY    LITERATURE. 

1780-1895.      By    Professor    GEORGE    SAINTSBURY.      Crown    8vo. 
7s.  6d. 

A  SHORT  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE.  By 
GEORGE  SAINTSBURY,  Professor  of  Rhetoric  and  English  Literature  in  the 
University  of  Edinburgh.  Crown  8vo.  8s.  6d. 

THE  HISTORY  OF  EARLY  ENGLISH   LITERATURE. 

Being  the  History  of  English  Poetry  from  its  Beginnings  to  the  Accession  of 
King  ^Elfrecl.  By  Rev.  STOPFORD  A.  BROOKE,  M.A.  With  a  Map. 
2  vols.  Svo.  2os.  net. 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE  FROM  A.D.  670  TO  A.D.  1832.  By 
Rev.  STOPFORD  A.  BROOKE,  M.A.  Globe  Svo.  35.  6d. 

PRIMER  ON  ENGLISH  LITERATURE.  By  Rev.  STOPFORD  A. 
BROOKE,  M.A.  Pott  Svo.  is. 

HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE.  By  O.  F. 
EMERSON.  Crown  Svo.  6s. 

BRIEF  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE  FOR 
HIGH  SCHOOLS.  By  O.  F.  EMERSON.  Crown  Svo.  45.  6d. 

CHRONOLOGICAL  OUTLINES  OF  ENGLISH  LITERA- 
TURE. By  F.  RYI.AND,  M.A.  Crown  Svo.  6s. 


MACMILLAN   AND   CO.,  LTD.,  LONDON. 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE— Continued, 

A  HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  TO 
THE  DEATH  OF  QUEEN  ANNE.  By  ADOLPHUS  WILLIAM  WARD, 
Litt.D.,  Master  of  Peterhouse,  Cambridge.  New  Edition.  3  Vols.  8vo. 
363.  net. 

HISTORY  OF  ENGLISH  POETRY.  By  WILLIAM  JOHN 
COURTHOPE,  C.B.,  M.A.,  Hon.  D.Litt.,  late  Professor  of  Poetry  in  the 
University  of  Oxford.  Vol.  I.  The  Middle  Ages— The  Influence  of  the 
Roman  Empire — The  Encyclopaedic  Education  of  the  Church— The  Feudal 
System.  8vo.  ios.net.  Vol.  II.  The  Renaissance  and  the  Reformation  : 
Influence  of  the  Court  and  the  Universities.  8vo.  los.  net. 

[Vols.  III.  and  IV.  in  the  Press. 

LIFE  IN  POETRY;  LAW  IN  TASTE.  Two  Series  of  Lectures 
delivered  in  Oxford.  By  W.  J.  COURTHOPE,  C.B.,  M.A.  8vo.  los.  net. 

THE  ENGLISH  POETS.  Selections,  with  Critical  Introductions 
by  various  writers,  and  a  General  Introduction  by  MATTHEW  ARNOLD. 
Edited  by  THOMAS  HUMPHRY  WARD,  M.A.,  late  Fellow  of  Brasenose 
College,  Oxford.  Crown  Svo.  Vol.  I.,  Chaucer  to  Donne,  75.  6d. 
Vol.  II.,  Ben  Jonson  to  Dryden,  ys.  6d.  Vol.  III.,  Addison  to  Blake, 
75.  6d.  Vol.  IV.,  Wordsworth  to  Tennyson,  Ss.  6d. 

ENGLISH  PROSE.  Selections,  with  Critical  Introductions  by 
various  writers,  and  General  Introductions  to  each  Period.  Edited  by  Sir 
HENRY  CKAIK,  K.C.B.  In  5  Volumes.  Crown  Svo.  Vols.  I. -IV., 
7s.  6d.  each  volume.  Vol.  V.,  8s.  6d. 

Vol.       I.  THE  FOURTEENTH  TO  THE  SIXTEENTH  CENTURY. 
Vol.     II.  THE  SIXTEENTH  CENTURY  TO  THE  RESTORATION. 
Vol.  III.  THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY. 
Vol.    IV.  THE  EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY. 
Vol.      V.  THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY. 

MAC.MILLAN   AND    CO.,  LTD.,  LONDON. 


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